She stood up softly and was about to go, but Gwen stopped her,
“Mother,” she cried, “you couldn’t be expected to understand children, you were meant for intellectual uses altogether! It seems to me hard and unjust that you should now be hampered with these feelings. Why can you not go back to your old peaceful life? You were happy in it, now your work is interfered with, and you are not happy. I wish I could do anything for you, I wish I could satisfy you!”
“Ah, dear, you don’t know how very little love would still my pain, but I don’t think that even if you would, you could give it to me—I don’t think you understand, dear, what love is.”
“Mother,” said the girl, in a low curiously soft tone, “I do not.”
Directly she had made the confession a horrible feeling of shame came on her.
“She knows everything of me there is to know now!” she thought, with a dull ache, “I wonder what use she will make of it.”
After a long wait she got some little idea. Her mother came and stood beside her silently for a minute or two, then she stooped down and kissed the girl’s hand tremulously, took up her basket with its burden, and went out of the room and upstairs.
Gwen looked at the little dent made by the basket on the bed, and a new rush of loneliness flooded her.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
There was always a sort of studious hush over Waring Park encompassing the whole place as in a garment, but one day a change crept suddenly into the nature of the hush, it lost all at once in culture and grew full of trembling awe; for Mrs. Waring lay upstairs on her great oak bed, her blue eyes looking out of her thin face full of a piteous longing.