Hesitating once more, he paused half-way along the corridor which led to Catherine’s sitting-room.  Voices reached him from persons who had entered the house by the front door.  He recognized Mrs. Presty’s loud confident tones.  She was taking leave of friends, and was standing with her back toward him.  Bennydeck waited, unobserved, until he saw her enter the sitting-room.  No such explanation as he was in search of could possibly take place in the presence of Catherine’s mother.  He returned to the garden.

Mrs. Presty was in high spirits.  She had enjoyed the Festival; she had taken the lead among the friends who accompanied her to the Palace; she had ordered everything, and paid for nothing, at that worst of all bad public dinners in England, the dinner which pretends to be French.  In a buoyant frame of mind, ready for more enjoyment if she could only find it, what did she see on opening the sitting-room door?  To use the expressive language of the stage, Catherine was “discovered alone”—­with her elbows on the table, and her face hidden in her hands—­the picture of despair.

Mrs. Presty surveyed the spectacle before her with righteous indignation visible in every line of her face.  The arrangement which bound her daughter to give Bennydeck his final reply on that day had been well known to her when she left the hotel in the morning.  The conclusion at which she arrived, on returning at night, was expressed with Roman brevity and Roman eloquence in four words: 

“Oh, the poor Captain!”

Catherine suddenly looked up.

“I knew it,” Mrs. Presty continued, with her sternest emphasis; “I see what you have done, in your face.  You have refused Bennydeck.”

“God forgive me, I have been wicked enough to accept him!”

Hearing this, some mothers might have made apologies; and other mothers might have asked what that penitential reply could possibly mean.  Mrs. Presty was no matron of the ordinary type.  She welcomed the good news, without taking the smallest notice of the expression of self-reproach which had accompanied it.

“My dear child, accept the congratulations of your fond old mother.  I have never been one of the kissing sort (I mean of course where women are concerned); but this is an occasion which justifies something quite out of the common way.  Come and kiss me.”

Catherine took no notice of that outburst of maternal love.

“I have forgotten everything that I ought to have remembered,” she said.  “In my vanity, in my weakness, in my selfish enjoyment of the passing moment, I have been too supremely happy even to think of the trials of my past life, and of the false position in which they have placed me toward a man, whom I ought to be ashamed to deceive.  I have only been recalled to a sense of duty, I might almost say to a sense of decency, by my poor little child.  If Kitty had not reminded me of her father—­”

Mrs. Presty dropped into a chair:  she was really frightened.  Her fat cheeks trembled like a jelly on a dish that is suddenly moved.