Sarah's cheeks had not lost their flush, nor had her heart ceased its angry throbbings, when she reached home. In the solitude of her chamber, she summoned strength and resolution to ask herself the question, so long avoided, shunned, as she had imagined, in prudence, as she now began to fear, in dread of a truthful reply.
When she married Lewis Hammond, she loved another. Fearful as was this sin, it would be yet more terrible were she now to discover a lurking fondness, an unconquered weakness for that other, in the heart of the trusted wife, the mother who, from that guilty bosom, nourished the little being that was, as yet, the embodiment of unsullied purity. It was a trying and a perilous task, to unfold deliberately, to pry searchingly into the record of that one short month that had held all the bloom and fragrance of her life's spring season; to linger over souvenirs and compare sensations—a painful and revolting process; but, alas! the revulsion was not at memories of that olden time; and as this appalling conviction dawned upon her, her heart died within her.
The nurse was arranging Baby Belle for the possible reception of her unknown aunt and uncle, that afternoon, when Mrs. Hammond came into the nursery, her face as pale and set as marble, and silently lifted the child from the girl's lap to her own. For one instant her cheek was laid against the velvet of the babe's; the ringlets of fair hair mingled with her dark locks, before she set about completing its unfinished toilette. With a nicety and care that would have seemed overstrained, had other than mother's hands been busied in the work, the stockings and slippers were fitted on the plump feet; the sunny curls rolled around the fingers of the tiring woman, and brushed back from the brow; the worked cambric robe lowered cautiously over the head, lest the effect of the coiffure should be marred; the sleeves looped up with bands of coral and gold, a necklace, belonging to the same set, clasped around the baby's white throat, and she was ready for survey.
"Now, Baby Belle and mamma will go down to meet papa!"
And with the little one still clinging to her neck, she met, in the lower hall, her husband ushering in Lucy and Philip Benson.
CHAPTER XIII.
Breakfast was kept back an hour next morning to await Lucy's tardy appearance. "She was sadly wearied with her journey," apologized Philip, and Sarah begged that she would keep her room and have her meals sent up to her—an hospitable offer, which Mr. Benson negatived.
Lucy did look tired and unrefreshed, and, to speak more plainly, very cross. Her hair, in its dryest state of pale yellow, was combed straight back above her temples; her skin was sallow; her wrapper carelessly put on, and its dead white unrelieved by even a bow of ribbon at the throat. Involuntarily Lewis glanced from the uninviting picture to his household deity, in her neat breakfast-dress of gray silk faced with pink, her glossy hair and tranquil features, and said to himself, in secret triumph, "Which is now the beauty? None of your trumpery ornamental articles for me!"
Philip's eyes were as keen as his host's, and the probability is that he instituted a similar comparison, however well his pride succeeded in concealing the act and its result. Cutting short his wife's querulous plaints of the discomforts of travel, and the horrors of nervous sleeplessness, he opened a conversation with Mr. Hammond in the subdued, perfectly-managed tones Sarah remembered so well, selecting such topics as would interest a business man and a citizen of a commercial metropolis. Lucy pouted, and applied herself for consolation to her breakfast.