“The moment I saw that my heart turned to water. That moment,” Flora said, with sudden bitter violence, raising herself upon her elbow, “all my hopes died, all my trust in him! It was my curse that I could not stop loving him as well——!”
The cold winter sunset, streaming through the bare woods beyond the stable yard, shone red upon the cheap cheerful paper of the walls, and struck Flora’s grizzled hair with a tinge of blood, and shadowed clearly behind her the hand she raised.
“They had already been man and wife forty-eight hours,” she said. “I think Roger Fleming felt remorse for the first time in his life when he saw the mother’s face. Perhaps life had always been too easy for him, perhaps it had really never occurred to him that a few months a widower, and with his two little sons, and with his forty years, he might not be thought an ideal match for a dreamy girl of seventeen. He had always been so courted—so wanted.
“At first Mrs. Kent talked of annulling the marriage—she was more like a woman suddenly smitten with insanity than any one I ever saw before or since. She grasped the girl by the arm, and her eyes blazed, and her face was ashen. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you shall not have her! She’s hardly more than a baby—she knows nothing of life!’
“‘Mamma,’ Cecily said, crying and clinging to her, ‘we were married two days ago. I am his wife.’
“I remember the mother looking at her, and the terrible silence there was in the hall. Lily began to whimper, beside me, and I caught her by the wrist. There were servants staring from the dining-room doorway.
“‘You—Sissy?’ Mrs. Kent said, in a whisper. Cecily went down on her knees, sobbing—almost screaming—like a child, and caught her mother about her knees.
“‘Cecily,’ Roger said, trying to raise her, ‘you are mine now. Your mother cannot hurt you. You are my wife!’
“‘Oh, let me go with my mother!’ she sobbed. ‘I hate you!’
“‘She is—in fact—your wife?’ Mrs. Kent said, looking over Cecily’s head at him.