"Impossible!" said Mr. Godfrey.
"Try," said Sir Philip; "ask the question; if they dare deny it, I will produce the proofs."
Mr. Godfrey laid his hand on the bell-rope. A servant appeared. "Request Mr. Eugene to come to me immediately." The man bowed and disappeared. Eugene soon entered. The door was carefully closed. Sir Philip could scarcely keep himself from springing on him; but Mr. Godfrey stood between them, and said in a hollow voice: "Eugene, answer without circumlocution or disguise, say yes or no, are your mother and sister Annie Catholics?"
"They are."
Mr. Godfrey pointed to the door; he could not speak. Eugene left the room. The two strong men trembled with impotent rage.
"A curse has fallen upon the house," muttered Mr. Godfrey at length, as he paced the room. "Who could have dreamed of this?"
"Mr. Godfrey," said Sir Philip, in tones of thunder, "you will tell your daughter that she never again will enter my doors. Prepare what settlements you please, send them to my lawyer; anything in reason I will consent to, but see her again I will not."
He quitted the house, nor did he ever see his injured wife again.
Scarcely had Sir Philip's carriage driven away when another drove up, containing Adelaide, the young Dowager Duchess of Durimont. She entered the house in a scarcely less agitated state than Sir Philip had left it in; but her excitement proceeded altogether from a different cause. Among Adelaide's numerous faults, want of affection for her mother certainly did not form one. On the contrary, she was accustomed not only to love but to reverence her mother as a very superior woman. Through the sunshine of youth, while enjoying the warmth of a mother's fondness and protection, Adelaide's affections had strengthened without that sentimentality of expression which Mrs. Godfrey would have taught her to repress had she seen it manifested, but they were none the less deep or tender for having hitherto found no occasion, of great display. On the first intimation she had received of her mother's illness, Adelaide had hastened at once to Estcourt Hall, and was with difficulty persuaded by Mr. Godfrey to retire. He feared that Adelaide's presence would but increase the excitement under which Mrs. Godfrey labored, and as the doctor's opinion was to that effect also, Adelaide was compelled, however reluctantly, to yield. They gave her no clew whatever as to the cause of her mother's malady, and though she had a general idea of some unworthy transaction in which Eugene was wronged and Hester enriched, she did not enter into particulars, nor mentally connect the facts with her mother's illness. The only effect it had upon her was to estrange her from Hester, and in a slighter degree from her father also.