“Is this my reward for letting you go back to the convent?” The voice was cold, dominating, a voice which always brought Irene into a trembling submission. The church to both meant but one thing—the Roman Catholic church—which John Shane, a Romanist turned scoffer, had mocked all his life, a church which to his Presbyterian widow was always the Scarlet Woman of Rome.
The girl said nothing but kept her eyes cast down, fingering all the while the carving on the arm of her rosewood chair. She had grown desperately pale. Her thin fingers trembled.
“Has this anything to do with Lily?” asked the mother with a sudden air of suspicion, and Irene answered “No! No!” with such intensity that Julia Shane, convinced that she still knew nothing, tried a new tack.
“You know how I feel,” she said. “I am old and I am tired. I have had enough unhappiness, Irene. This would be the last.”
Tears came into the eyes of the girl, and the trembling grew and spread until her whole body was shaking. “It is all I have,” she cried.
“Don’t be morbid!”
The eagle look came into Mrs. Shane’s face—the look with which she faced down all the world save her own family.
“I won’t hear of it,” she added. “I’ve told you often enough, Irene.... I won’t have a daughter of mine sell herself to the devil if I can prevent it.” She spoke with a rising intensity of feeling that was akin to hatred. “You shall not do it as long as I live and never after I am dead, if I can help it.”
The girl tried not to sob. The new defiance in her soul gave her a certain spiritual will to oppose her mother. Never before had she dared even to argue her case. “If it were Lily ...” she began weakly.
“It would make no difference. Besides, it could never be Lily. That is out of the question. Lily is no fool....”