"I am your mother, David," said Lady Thryng, reprovingly.
"You have reason to be proud of your son! Oh! curse me! I won't be more of a cad than I am now by laying the blame on you. I could have helped it, but you couldn't. We are born and bred that way, over here. The petty lines of distinction our ancestors drew for us,—we bow down and worship them, and say God drew them. Over here a man hides the sun with his own hand and then cries out, 'Where is it?'"
"I would comfort you if I could, but this sounds very much like ranting. I thought you had outlived that sort of thing, my son."
"Thank God, no. I've been very hard pressed of late, but I've not outlived it."
"You will tell me this trouble—now—before you leave me? You must, dear boy." He took the hand she put out to him, and held it in silence; then, incoherently, in a voice humbled and low,—almost lost in the rumbling of the carriage,—he told her. It was a revelation of the soul, and as the mother listened she too suffered and wept, but did not relent.
Cassandra's cry, "I am a strangah!" sounded in her ears, but her sorrow was for her son. Yes, she was a stranger, and had wisely taken herself back to her own place; what else could she do? Was it not in the nature of a Providence that David had been delayed until after her departure? The duty now devolved upon herself to comfort him without further reproof, but nevertheless to make him see and do his duty in the position he had been called to fill.
"Of course she has charm, David, and evidently good sense as well."
"How do you mean?"
"To perceive the inevitable and return without fuss or complaint to her own station in life."
For an instant he sat stunned, and ere he could give utterance to his rage, she resumed, "Naturally, marriage now, in your own class can't be; you'll simply have to live as a bachelor." David groaned. "Why, my son, many do, of their own choice, and you have managed to be happy during this year."