"It is pretty bad," she said compassionately.
"Mother," he lifted his face and his eyes were bloodshot. "Why did you call me after that villain? Why does my father love him still? I have never heard you say one word against him."
She flinched before the accusation.
"Dear," she said. "I have only just been told of this. Your father kept it from me all those years."
"And you were engaged to him at the time! Good Lord!" he broke out with young passion. "Don't tell me, Mother, that there is any excuse for him. I could not bear that from you. One law for the man, another for the woman: it is the easy way of the world. My poor little darling!"
Suddenly he choked and got up and went away from her. She found nothing to say.
He was back again in a second, while she watched him helplessly.
"I don't want her to know," he said. "She must not know. What am I to do? She ought to enter this family as its loved and honoured daughter. Mother, I do not intend to give her up."
She had been waiting for it. If he had said otherwise she would have been bitterly disappointed, however much she might have tried to deceive herself. It was a pity, a thousand pities, the child could not have come to them without that smirch. But it had not touched her: there was no stain on her. Thinking upon Stella's mother she said to herself that no levity in the girl she had been had led to her downfall. Why, Shawn had said she was the simplest, whitest of creatures. It made Terence's sin all the blacker.
She drew her boy's head down to her and kissed it.