His wife sat still with sad wide eyes.
“It seems a reasonless thing in one in Gwen’s position,” he went on with a fine touch of pride, “to marry without love. I know such things do happen now and again with young portionless women—women have a feline craving for soft living and pretty things, but our daughter Gwen—ah!”
“I thought all this, I knew it,” said Mrs. Waring quietly, “I wished so often to ask Gwen definitely for the truth, but I did not seem able to do so, I wish now I had.”
Mrs. Fellowes put her hands tenderly on her shoulders and made her lie down again.
“She will love, she will be happy!” she whispered softly, “she is in good hands.”
“Too soon, too soon!” murmured the mother, “she should be in mine still. But they never held her. She should be happy now, now,” she cried with sudden passion, her voice still in soft minors, “not in the future! Why should she have to reach her happiness and her love ‘through much tribulation’? It should come by divine right. She is so strong, she will suffer strongly, she is so strong that when passion comes to her it will tear her, torture her, break her to pieces! Henry, Henry,” she gasped, “we are to blame, we have failed miserably! We never had any right to have children. While we have been worrying over the dry fossils of the past we have allowed the living—the young—to wither around us. Ah, how sad it all is, how sad!” she sighed, “how sad!”
The Rector came and put his hand on his wife’s shoulder softly. He well knew how awful this too-late awakening of the other woman’s motherhood was to her, with her own so terribly, persistently wide-awake and alive with the throbbing of unsatisfied pain.
There was nothing further to be said, nothing, altogether unsatisfactory as everything was. Mr. Fellowes felt this and said in his bright frank way.
“We are all very tired, and you—” he said, turning to his wife, “you are frightfully washed out! And, good gracious! Dacre is waiting all this time!”
To her own intense amazement, Mrs. Fellowes stooped down and gave Mrs. Waring a kiss.