“I ought to go to her? You think so? Please—your ladyship, will you advise me?”
Lady Lansdowne hesitated. “I cannot,” she said.
“But—there is no reason,” Mary asked faintly, “why I should not go to her?”
“There is no reason. I honestly believe,” Lady Lansdowne repeated solemnly, “that there is no reason—except your father’s wish. It is for you to say how far that, which should weigh with you in all other things, shall weigh with you in this.”
Suddenly a burning colour dyed Mary’s face. “I will go to her,” she cried impulsively. She had been weak once, she had been weak! And how she had suffered for that weakness! But she would be strong now. “Where is she, if you please?” she continued bravely. “Can I see her at once?”
“She is in the path leading to the kennels. You know it? No, you need not take leave of me, child! Go, and,” Lady Lansdowne added with feeling, “God forgive me if I have done wrong in sending you!”
“You have not done wrong!” Mary cried, an unwonted spirit in her tone. And, without taking other leave, she turned and went—though her limbs trembled under her. She was going to her mother! To her mother! Oh, strange, oh, impossible thought!
Yet, engrossing as was that thought, it could not quite oust fear of her father and of his anger. And the blush soon died; so that the whiteness of her cheeks when she reached the Kennel Path was a poor set off for the ribbons that decked her muslin robe. What she expected, what she wished or feared or hoped she could never remember. What she saw, that which awaited her, was a woman, ill, and plainly clad, with only the remains of beauty in her wasted features; but withal cynical and hard-eyed, and very, very far from the mother of her day-dreams.
Such as she was the unknown scanned Mary with a kind of scornful amusement. “Oh,” she said, “so this is what they have made of Miss Vermuyden? Let me look at you, girl?” And laying her hands on Mary’s shoulders she looked long into the tearful, agitated face. “Why, you are like a sheet of paper!” she continued, raising the girl’s chin with her finger. “I wonder you dared to come with Sir Robert saying no! And, you little fool,” she continued in a swift spirit of irritation, “as soon not come at all, as look at me like that! You’ve got my chin and my nose, and more of me than I thought. But God knows where you got your hare’s eyes! Are you always frightened?”
“No, Ma’am, no!” she stammered.