The whole tenor of her face was changed at that moment.  Even to Hester she had been stern, forbidding, and sullen.  There had not been a gracious movement about her lips or eyes since the visitors had come.  A stranger, could a stranger have seen it all, would have said that the mother did not love her child, that there was no touch of tenderness about the woman’s heart.  But now, when she was alone, with the one thing on earth that was dear to her, she melted at once.  In a moment Hester found herself seated on the sofa, with her mother kneeling before her, sobbing, and burying her face in the loved one’s lap.  ’You love me, Hester,—­still.’

‘Love you, mamma!  You know I love you.’

’Not as it used to be.  I am nothing to you now.  I can do nothing for you now.  You turn away from me, because—­because—­because—­’

‘I have never turned away from you, mamma.’

’Because I could not bear that you should be taken away from me and given to him.’

‘He is good, mamma.  If you would only believe that he is good!’

‘He is not good.  God only is good, my child.’

‘He is good to me.’

’Ah, yes;—­he has taken you from me.  When I thought you were coming back, in trouble, in disgrace from the world, nameless, a poor injured thing, with your nameless babe, then I comforted myself because I thought that I could be all and everything to you.  I would have poured balm into the hurt wounds.  I would have prayed with you, and you and I would have been as one before the Lord.’

‘You are not sorry, mamma, that I have got my husband again?’

‘Oh, I have tried,—­I have tried not to be sorry.’

‘You do not believe now that that woman was his wife?’

Then the old colour came back upon her face, and something of the old look, and the tenderness was quenched in her eyes, and the softness of her voice was gone.  ‘I do not know,’ she said.

’Mamma, you must know.  Get up and sit by me till I tell you.  You must teach yourself to know this,—­to be quite sure of it.  You must not think that your daughter is,—­is living in adultery with the husband of another woman.  To me who knew him there has never been a shadow of a doubt, not a taint of fear to darken the certainty of my faith.  It could not have been so, perhaps, with you who have not known his nature.  But now, now, when all of them, from the Queen downwards, have declared that this charge has been a libel, when even the miscreants themselves have told against themselves, when the very judge has gone back from the word in which he was so confident, shall my mother,—­and my mother only,—­think that I am a wretched, miserable, nameless outcast, with a poor nameless, fatherless baby?  I am John Caldigate’s wife before God’s throne, and my child is his child, and his lawful heir, and owns his father’s name.  My husband is to me before all the world,—­first, best, dearest,—­my king, my man, my master, and my lover.  Above all things, he is my husband.’  She had got up, and was standing before her mother with her arms folded before her breast, and the fire glanced from her eyes as she spoke.  ’But, mamma, because I love him more, I do not love you less.’