“I do not think that that child is well,” Camilla had said, after an interval of silence, addressing her husband; “she seemed unnaturally depressed. Depression under such circumstances as hers would be natural and proper in any thinking being, but as she certainly does not come under that head, there must be some other cause.”
As she spoke Mrs. Tancred left her chair and the room. Her absence lasted for a quarter of an hour, and towards the end of it Edward grew restless; that is to say, inwardly, for he allowed himself no change of posture that would recognize or indulge his uneasiness. Was she ill? and if so, was hers the kind of constitution upon which illness would take much hold? Both her parents had died when well under forty, but as neither of their deaths could be called natural ones, their shortlivedness could not be held to lend probability to hers, unless her mother’s tendencies were hereditary.
Camilla’s re-entrance interrupted the shudder caused by the last supposition.
“I was mistaken,” she said calmly, though his eye noted the sign of an emotion of some kind on her harsh face; “she was sleeping quite quietly.”
Both settled down again to their occupations, and a few minutes elapsed before Camilla, bringing out the words as one forced to make an admission against the grain, said—
“I am afraid that my tendency is to judge people too severely; and I believe that in the case of this unfortunate girl I may have done so.”
She paused, and he had time for an inwardly interjected wish that she had used some other adjective than that which, employed as a noun, had such an unsavoury significance when applied to a woman!
“I am led to think that some glimmer of a sense of right and wrong is awakening in her; that I trace some germ of a desire for better things!”
Again she halted, and he threw in a “Yes?”
“You heard at dinner to-day how she had conquered her dislike to leaving the fireside in deference to my wishes; it came out quite unostentatiously—not as if she were making a merit of it.”