"Please let the subject alone," she said coolly. "If you persist in talking of it, you will drive me to go and sit in my own room—that's all."
A week later, however, when she returned from a ride to find Evelyn again at the detested davenport, her head bowed upon her arms, like a flower broken with the wind, all the inherent motherhood in her rose up and overflowed. Hastily crossing the room she knelt down beside the small tragic figure and kissed a pearl-white fragment of forehead; the only spot available at the moment. "Poor darling!" she whispered. "Is it really as bad as all that?"
Caresses from Honor were so rare that for an instant Evelyn was taken aback; then she laid her head on the girl's shoulder with a sigh of pure content.
"Oh, Honor! the world seems all broken to pieces when you are unkind to me!"
Honor kissed her again.
"I won't be unkind to you any more; and we'll just forget from this minute that it ever happened at all."
But to forget is not to undo; and during their brief estrangement Evelyn Desmond had added a link to the chain of Fate, whose strongest coils are most often wrought by our own unskilful fingers.
[19] Has come.