Cecil was then in one of his saddest moments. In his hand was a tiny packet, and gently and tenderly he fingered it, for it contained the withered daisies culled from his mother's grave; and his heart grew very full as her image came vividly to memory with all the idolatrous love she had for him, her only son.
'Thank God she knows nothing of all this shame and misery! Yet, who can say—perhaps?' he muttered, and cast his eyes upward for a moment.
An essayist tells us that 'memory is the peculiar domain of the individual. In going back in recollection to the scenes of other years, he is drawing on the secret storehouse of his own unconsciousness, with which a stranger must not intermeddle.' So Cecil felt himself a child again, and into that storehouse he looked back to much of love and sorrow, to many struggles, anxieties, and triumphs, known to him and his mother only—his dead mother, of whom we may learn much more anon; and now by the course of events believing that Mary Montgomerie was utterly lost to him, he clung more than ever to the memory of his mother, for she had been all the world to him, as he to her.
'Could I expect that she would spend all the best years of her life waiting for a fellow who might never be able to marry her?' he had said once to Fotheringhame.
'But, man alive!' responded the other; 'she is able to marry you.'
'Was, you may say; we are separated now for ever.'
Times there were when Cecil thought he should go mad, as the whole situation in all its details of too probable ruin and disgrace, together with the certain loss of Mary, swept through his brain with painful and provoking iteration.
Could it be that he was the victim of some plot? Hew had been near him on that night, he had heard; but that was all. Had twenty nights or twenty years elapsed since that fatal ball? he sometimes thought, for most strange seemed the confusion of time and inversion of events.
So full was he of much and heavy thought, that he did not hear his door open, or was conscious of any one approaching, till a dog suddenly leaped upon him, thrusting its cold nose into his hand, and anon licked it with hot, flapping tongue—Snarley, as if conscious that his friend was in trouble, for Snarley it was, grovelling and abasing himself at his feet.
Tommy Atkins had ushered in three ladies and Fotheringhame, their escort.