IX

During the next day and the next Guion continued ill, so ill that his daughter had all she could attend to in the small tasks of nursing.  The lull in events, however, gave her the more time for thinking, and in her thoughts two things struck her as specially strange.  Of these, the first and more remarkable was the degree to which she identified herself with her father’s wrong-doing.  The knowledge that she had for so many years been profiting by his misdeeds produced in her a curious sense of having shared them.  Though she took pains to remind herself that she was morally guiltless, there was something within her—­an imaginative quality perhaps that rejected the acquittal.  Pity, too, counted in her mental condition, as did also that yearning instinct called maternal, which keeps women faithful to the weak and the fallen among those they love.  To have washed her own hands and said, “See here!  I am innocent!” would have seemed to her much like desertion of a broken old man who had no one but her to stand by him.  Even while she made attempts to reason herself out of it, the promptings to the vicarious acceptance of guilt, more or less native to the exceptionally strong and loyal, was so potent in her that she found herself saying, in substance if not in words, “Inasmuch as he did it, I did it, too.”  It was not a purposely adopted stand on her part; it was not even clear to her why she was impelled to take it; she took it only because, obeying the dictates of her nature; she could do nothing else.

Nevertheless, it occasioned her some surprise, whenever she had time to think of it, to note the speed with which she had adapted herself to the facts.  Once revealed, she seemed to have always known them—­to have shared that first embarrassment for ready money that had induced her father to borrow from funds so temptingly under his control, and to have gone on with him, step by step, through the subsequent years of struggle and disaster.  They were years over which the sun was already darkened and the moon turned into blood, so that, looking back on them, it was almost impossible to recapture the memory of the light-heartedness with which she had lived through them.  It was incredible to her now that they had been years of traveling and visiting and dancing and hunting and motoring and yachting, of following fashion and seeking pleasure in whatever might have been the vogue of the minute.  Some other self, some pale, secondary, astral self, must have crossed and recrossed the Atlantic and been a guest in great houses and become a favorite in London, Paris, Biarritz, Florida, Scotland, Rome!  Some other self must have been sought out for her society, admired for her style, and privileged to refuse eligible suitors!  Some other self must have met Rupert Ashley in the little house at Southsea and promised to become his wife!  From the standpoint of the present it seemed to her as if an unreal life