Lady Markham looked at her with a penetrating gaze. “It was—everything you knew, my little Frances. I understand you, my dear. You will not be disloyal to the past. But to Constance, who does not know it, who knows something else—— Poor Con! I understand. But she will have to pay for her experience, like all the rest.”
Frances had been profoundly agitated, but in the way of happiness. She did not feel happy now. She felt disposed to cry, not because of the relief of tears, but because she did not know how else to express the sense of contrariety, of disturbance that had got into her mind. Was it that already a wrong note had sounded between herself and this unknown mother, whom it had been a rapture to see and touch? Or was it only that she was tired? Lady Markham saw the condition into which her nerves and temper were strained. She took her back tenderly into her room. “My dear,” she said, “if you would rather not, don’t change your dress. Do just as you please to-night. I would stay and help you, or I would send Josephine, my maid, to help you; but I think you will prefer to be left alone and quiet.”
“Oh yes,” cried Frances with fervour; then she added hastily, “If you do not think me disagreeable to say so.”
“I am not prepared to think anything in you disagreeable, my dear,” said her mother, kissing her—but with a sigh. This sigh Frances echoed in a burst of tears when the door closed and she found herself alone—alone, quite alone, more so than she had ever been in her life, she whispered to herself, in the shock of the unreasonable and altogether fantastic disappointment which had followed her ecstasy of pleasure. Most likely it meant nothing at all but the reaction from that too highly raised level of feeling.
“No; I am not disappointed,” Lady Markham was saying down-stairs. She was standing before the genial blaze of the fire, looking into it with her head bent and a serious expression on her face. “Perhaps I was too much delighted for a moment; but she, poor child, now that she has looked at me a second time, she is a little, just a little disappointed in me. That’s rather hard for a mother, you know; or I suppose you don’t know.”
“I never was a mother,” said Markham. “I should think it’s very natural. The little thing has been forming the most romantic ideas. If you had been an angel from heaven——”
“Which I am not,” she said with a smile, still looking into the fire.
“Heaven be praised,” said Markham. “In that case, you would not have suited me—which you do, mammy, you know, down to the ground.”
She gave a half glance at him, a half smile, but did not disturb the chain of her reflections. “That’s something, Markham,” she said.