Mrs. Fordyce felt the above conversation to be so unsatisfactory that she occupied herself before dinner in writing a letter to her nephew, in which she treated him to some very plain-speaking, and pointed out that unless he made haste to atone for past shortcomings, his chance of winning the heiress of Bourhill was not worth very much.

This letter reached the offender when he was seated at his father’s breakfast-table with the other members of the family.  He slipped it into his pocket, and his mother, keenly watching him, observed a curious look, half surprise, half relief, on his face.  She was not therefore in the least surprised when he came to her immediately after breakfast for a moment’s private conversation.

’I’ve had a letter from Aunt Isabel, written at Bourhill last night; you can read it if you like.’

She took it from him eagerly, and perused it with intense interest.  Like her son, she had really abandoned hope, and had accepted the silence of Gladys as her lover’s final dismissal.

‘This is extraordinary, George,’ she said excitedly.  ’The girl has been, and gone, evidently, and never uttered a word.  Can you believe it?’

’I must.  Gladys would not be fretting, as Aunt Isabel says she is, if she knew all that.  What shall I do?’

His mother thought a moment.  She had been very unhappy during the last two weeks, daily dreading the revelation of the miserable story which would make her idolised boy the centre of an unpleasant scandal.  Her relief was almost too great, and it was a few minutes before she could collect her thoughts and gather up the scattered threads of her former ambition.

’You may have a chance yet.  It is a slender one; but still I advise you to make instant use of it.  Go down and make it up with Gladys, at any cost.  If she has heard nothing, and is at all pliable, press for an early marriage.’

She gave the advice in all good faith, and without a thought of the great moral wrong she was committing.  The supreme selfishness of her motherly idolatry blinded her to the cruel injustice she was meting out to the innocent girl whose heritage she coveted for her son.  Yet she counted herself a Christian woman, and would have had nothing but indignant scorn for the individual who might presume to question her right to such a title.

This is no solitary or exceptional case.  Such things are done daily, and religion is made the cloak to cover a multitude of sins.  Mrs. Fordyce had so long striven to serve both God and Mammon that she had lost the fine faculty which can discern the dividing line.  In other words, her conscience was dead, and allowed her to give this deplorable advice without a dissenting word.

‘It would be deuced awkward,’ said the amiable George, ’if anything were to come out after.’

’After marriage, you mean?  Oh, there would be a scene, a few hysterics perhaps, and there the matter would be at an end.  A wife can’t afford to be so punctilious as a maiden fancy free.  She has herself too much to lose.’