“What shall I do?  Charlotte, dear, what shall I do?”

“Let us go to our own home.  Better to brave a little damp and discomfort than constant humiliation.”

“This is my home, my own dear home!  It is full of memories of your father and Harry.”

“O mother, I should think you would want to forget Harry!”

“No, no, no!  I want to remember him every hour of the day and night.  How could I pray for him, if I forgot him?  Little you know how a mother loves, Charlotte.  His father forgave him:  shall I be less pitiful?—­I, who nursed him at my breast, and carried him in my arms.”

Charlotte did not answer.  She was touched by her mother’s fidelity, and she found in her own heart a feeling much akin to it.  Their conversation reverted to their unhappy position, and to the difficulty of making an immediate change.  For not only was the dower-house in an untenantable state, but the weather was very much against them.  The gray weather, the gloomy sky, the monotonous rains, the melting snow, the spiteful east wind,—­by all this enmity of the elements, as well as by the enmity in the household, the poor bereaved lady was saddened and controlled.

The wretched conversation was followed by a most unhappy silence.  Both hearts were brooding over their slights and wrongs.  Day by day Charlotte’s life had grown harder to bear.  Sophia’s little flaunts and dissents, her astonishments and corrections, were almost as cruel as the open hatred of Julius, his silence, his lowering brows, and insolence of proprietorship.  To these things she had to add the intangible contempt of servants, and the feeling of constraint in the house where she had been the beloved child and the one in authority.  Also she found the insolence which Stephen had to brave every time he called upon her just as difficult to bear as were her own peculiar slights.  Julius had ceased to recognize him, had ceased to speak of him except as “that person.”  Every visit he made Charlotte was the occasion of some petty impertinence, some unmistakable assurance that his presence was offensive to the master of Seat-Sandal.

All these things troubled the mother also, but her bitterest pang was the cruelty of Sophia.  A slow, silent process of alienation had been going on in the girl ever since her engagement to Julius:  it had first touched her thoughts, then her feelings; now its blighting influence had deteriorated her whole nature.  And in her mother’s heart there were sad echoes of that bitter cry that comes down from age to age, “Oh, my son Absalom, Absalom!  My son, my son!”