They, of course, always believed the worst of everybody.  As for her, all she wanted for the child was a good husband.  Was it not better, in a world of fortune-hunters, that Aileen, with her half-million, should marry early?  Of money, she had, one would think, enough.  It was only the greed of certain persons which could possibly desire more.  Birth?  The young man was honorably born, good-looking, well mannered.  What did you want more? She accepted a democratic age; and the obstacles thrown by Aileen’s guardians in the way of an immediate engagement between the young people appeared to her, so she declared, either vulgar or ridiculous.

Well, poor lady, she had suffered for her whims.  First of all, her levity had perceived, with surprise and terror, the hold that passion was taking on the delicate and sensitive nature of Aileen.  This young girl, so innocent and spotless in thought, so virginally sweet in manner, so guileless in action, developed a power of loving, an absorption of the whole being in the beloved, such as our modern world but rarely sees.

She lived, she breathed for Warkworth.  Her health, always frail, suffered from their separation.  She became a thin and frail vision—­a “gossamer girl” indeed.  The ordinary life of travel and society lost all hold upon her; she passed through it in a mood of weariness and distaste that was in itself a danger to vital force.  The mother became desperately alarmed, and made a number of flurried concessions.  Letters, at any rate, should be allowed, in spite of the guardians, and without their knowledge.  Yet each letter caused emotions which ran like a storm-wind through the child’s fragile being, and seemed to exhaust the young life at its source.  Then came the diphtheria, acting with poisonous effect on a nervous system already overstrained.

And in the midst of the mother’s anxieties there burst upon her the sudden, incredible tale that Warkworth—­to whom she herself was writing regularly, and to whom Aileen, from her bed, was sending little pencilled notes, sweetly meant to comfort a sighing lover—­had been entangling himself in London with another, a Miss Le Breton, positively a nobody, as far as birth and position were concerned, the paid companion of Lady Henry Delafield, and yet, as it appeared, a handsome, intriguing, unscrupulous hussy, just the kind of hawk to snatch a morsel from a dove’s mouth—­a woman, in fact, with whom a little bread-and-butter girl like Aileen might very well have no chance.

Emily Lawrence’s letter, in the tone of the candid friend, written after her evening at Crowborough House, had roused a mingled anguish and fury in the mother’s breast.  She lifted her eyes from it to look at Aileen, propped up in bed, her head thrown back against the pillow, and her little hands closed happily over Warkworth’s letters; and she went straight from that vision to write to the traitor.