"Better not wonder. You could not help me. Had my brave Adam been alive, I might have told him. He was daring, Karl; you are not."
"Not daring, mother? I? I think I am sufficiently so. At any rate, I could be as daring as the best in your interests."
"Perhaps you might. But it would not serve me, you see. And
sympathy--the sympathy that my poor lost Adam gave me--I have never from you sought or wished for."
She was plain at any rate. Karl felt the stab, just as he had felt many other of her stabs during his life. Mrs. Andinnian shook off her secret thoughts with a kind of shiver; and, to banish them, began talking with Karl of ordinary things.
"What has become of Ann Hopley?" he enquired. "She was much attached to you: I thought perhaps you might have kept her on."
"Ann Hopley?--oh, the servant I had at Weymouth. No, I did not keep her on, Karl. She had a husband, you know."
At ten o'clock Mrs. Andinnian wished him goodnight and good-bye, and retired. Karl sat on, thinking and wondering. He was sorry she did not place confidence in him, and so give him a chance of helping her: but she never had, and he supposed she never would. At times--and this was one--it had almost seemed to Karl as though she could not be his mother.
[CHAPTER X.]
Mrs. Andinnian's Secret
"Will you take anything, Sir Karl?"