The light from the Sovereign lightship flashed and disappeared.
“The thing is unbelievable! monstrous!” he exclaimed aloud. “How blind I have been!”
Perhaps Philip had been a little selfish as well as blind.
The mother, who was still young, and who, fresh from school, had been married to Philip’s father, a man twenty years her senior, and a hard, unsympathetic barrister, who though strictly honorable, had no affection in his composition; the mother Philip had looked upon as a sort of asset of his own. His father being dead the mother naturally became the property of the son. She had been a dutiful wife. It now remained to her to be a dutiful mother. Philip, whom she loved tenderly, could leave her and take a bungalow; but she had not the right to leave him. Above all, she had no right to entertain the idea of a second marriage. That the mother of a grown-up son should fall in love seemed scarcely decent.
This had been Philip’s idea. He somehow felt that the whole business was a sacrilege. He conceived of his beautiful mother as a permanent pure jewel set in the old home. She was to grow white-haired there. She was to be always there, waiting his own erratic returns.
He had resented her young appearance as “unsuitable.” He had gently but firmly reproved her for wearing hats instead of bonnets; for gowning herself as his sister should have been gowned, if he had had one.
Philip was five-and-twenty, and had the arrogance of that age.
Mrs. Barrimore was forty-two but she looked no more than thirty. And art did not enter into the illusion. Mrs. Barrimore’s smooth, wild-rose complexion was innocent of powder. The entire absence of lines was not due to massage. The masses of wavy nut-brown hair were her own, and no dyer’s art bestowed the rich color. The clear grey eyes had the tender light and brightness of youth.
And Colonel Lane was in love with her! Phyllis—silly, inconsequent Phyllis—had seen it, while he, with his quick insight, had never suspected it till to-night!
He might have known—yes, he certainly ought to have known—that Uncle Robert could not have been the attraction which made Colonel Lane so frequent a visitor at Hawk’s Nest.