“Whether she actually wrote to her mother asking for a reconciliation or not, I don’t know,” Flora resumed. “Roger had forbidden her to ‘truckle,’ as he called it; he felt that she must wait for advances from her mother. They never quarrelled about it, but I heard her say sometimes, ‘I wish my mother would walk in!’ and heard Roger answer her, not unkindly, but half-jokingly: ‘Not into my house!’
“One day, when they had been married a few months, he was talking to me about his brother Will. ‘Why don’t you marry Will, Flo?’ he said to me, with a sort of laugh. ‘Good enough for the poor relation?’ I said, trying to laugh back. But I was bitter, then—life was utterly hateful to me. ‘Why, how you can remember!’ he said, with a look that told me that he knew that he himself, and that old unhappy love of mine for him, was keeping me dark and angry and fuming about Wastewater for the best years of my life!
“‘I may marry Will,’ I said, trembling all over. And a few months later I did, although the idea had never come into my mind until that day. Not that I didn’t love your father, Sylvia; I did. Everyone loved poor Will, and he had loved me a long, long time. Will and I were married, and Roger gave his brother a handsome check—which Will put into a patent for a bed-couch——
“Not that it mattered! Not that it mattered!” Flora’s tired voice said, drearily, and was silent.
“Part of the time we lived at Wastewater,” she resumed, “and sometimes, when Will was trying one of his new jobs, we had an apartment in Boston. Lily was sometimes with us, and sometimes she and Cecily and Roger went on short trips—they went to Bermuda one spring, I remember—Cecily was having one of her better times.
“Then Roger would come to me, distressed; Cecily was having those hateful pains again. She would come in to a Boston hospital for an operation, and I would go to see her every day, and bring her and her nurses back to Wastewater, and stay for a while, until she felt stronger.
“Sylvia was born in Boston, but a few weeks later we came to Wastewater, and both Roger and his wife grew so fond of her that I had an excuse for almost never leaving, although I kept my little Boston flat. Will was in the West for almost two years, working in Portland, and Oakland, and Los Angeles, and sometimes we would talk as if the baby and I might join him there. But as Cecily grew no stronger, and poor little Lily began to show signs of a sort of well—they called it ‘passive melancholia,’ and as the baby grew to be everybody’s plaything——”
She opened her sunken eyes and fixed them with the shadow of a dark smile upon Sylvia’s stricken and acutely attentive face.
“Mamma——” Sylvia breathed, bowing her dark head over her mother’s hand.
“Poor little Silver, as Roger used to call you!” Flora said, tenderly. “I did it for you, dear, or at least I meant it for you. But it was never deliberate—it was all an accident.”