Something in her face and voice so startled him that, with his unstrung nerves, he could not stand upright. Sinking heavily into a chair before the picture, he looked up at her in wonder, answering bitterly:
“Why need I have told you her sacred name when I knew that you would only execrate it because my darling was a poor girl and not in the ‘set’ you adore? Besides, where was the use? She was dead, poor little Floy!”
They gazed at one another questioningly, wondering how they could break to him the truth that Floy was alive and well. In his nervous, enfeebled condition, how would the shock of joy affect him?
The father, with the usual masculine dread of scenes, kept himself in the background, leaving it all to the two women.
Mrs. Beresford’s heart swelled with joy as she thought that now was the moment in which to atone for all her cruelty.
She had been bitterly despondent over her son’s low spirits and failing health.
She had fancied sometimes, in her trouble, that the spirit of the beloved dead girl was drawing him by invisible threads to rejoin her in the spirit world.
Against that subtile power of love she had felt herself so impatient that she could have cried aloud for mercy, in her wild despair.
Then, what joy, what relief, to know that the girl was alive—a girl, too, so fair, so young, so innocent that she need not be ashamed to present her to the world as her son’s wife.
Her face fairly beamed with joy as she bent over him asking, tenderly: