Eleanor raised her head.
'I, too,' she said, almost in a whisper—'I, too, have lost a son. But he was a little fellow.'
The Contessa looked at her in astonishment and burst into tears.
'Then we are two miserable women!' she said, wildly.
Eleanor clung to her—but with a sharp sense of unfitness and unworthiness. She felt herself a hypocrite. In thought and imagination her boy now was but a hovering shadow compared to Manisty. It was not this sacred mother-love that was destroying her own life.
* * * * *
As they drove home through the evening freshness, Eleanor's mind pursued its endless and solitary struggle.
Lucy sat beside her. Every now and then Eleanor's furtive guilty look sought the girl's face. Sometimes a flying terror would grip her by the heart. Was Lucy graver—paler? Were there some new lines round the sweet eyes? That serene and virgin beauty—had it suffered the first withering touch since Eleanor had known it first? And if so, whose hand? whose fault?
Once or twice her heart failed within her; foreseeing a remorse that was no sooner imagined than it was denied, scouted, hurried out of sight.
That brave, large-brained woman with whom she had just been talking; there was something in the atmosphere which the Contessa's personality shed round it, that made Eleanor doubly conscious of the fever in her own blood. As in Father Benecke's case, so here; she could only feel herself humiliated and dumb before these highest griefs—the griefs that ennoble and enthrone.