“Can I leave the door open between our rooms, in case you want anything in the night?” she faltered.

“Oh, yes; certainly.”

“May I kiss you?”

“Yes, of course.”

CHAPTER VI

MOLLY COMES OF AGE

For some time after that terrible night Molly never spoke to Mrs. Carteret unless it were absolutely necessary.  It may be difficult to believe that no explanation was sought or given and after a time things seemed to be much as before.  The silence of a brooding nature is a terrible thing; and it is more common in narrow, dull lives than in any other.  Uneducated men and women in villages, or servants cramped together in one house, I have known to brood over some injury in an awful silence for twenty or thirty years.  If Molly’s future life had been in Mrs. Carteret’s hands, the sense of wrong would have burrowed deeper and been even better hidden, but Molly, aided by Miss Carew, had convinced herself that liberty would come, without any fight for it, at twenty-one; so her view of the present was that it was a tiresome but inevitable waiting for real life.

Miss Carew, watching her anxiously, could never find out what she had thought since the night of the alarm; and if she had seen into her mind at any one moment alone, she would have been misled.  For Molly’s imagination flew from one extreme to another.  At first, indeed, that sentence, “Your mother’s daughter ought to be more careful than other girls,” had seemed simply a revelation of evil of which she could not doubt the truth.  She saw in a flash why her mother had gone out of her life although still living.  The whole possibility of shame and horror appeared to fit in with the facts of her secluded life with Mrs. Carteret.  A morbid fear as to her own birth seized on the poor child’s mind, and might have destroyed the healthier aspect of life for her entirely; but happily Mrs. Carteret and the governess did think of this danger, and showed some skill in laying the phantom.  Some photographs of John Dexter as a young man were brought out and shown to the governess in Molly’s presence, and her comments on the likeness to Molly were true and sounded spontaneous.  Relieved of this horror the girl’s mind reacted to the hope that Mrs. Carteret had only spoken in temper and spite, grossly exaggerating some grievance against Molly’s mother.  Then was the ideal restored to its pedestal, and expiatory offerings of sentiment of the most elaborate kind hung round the image of the ill-used and misunderstood, the beautiful, unattainable mother.  If Miss Carew had seen into the reveries of her pupil at such a moment, she would hardly have believed how they alternated with the coldest fits of doubt and scepticism.  Molly was dealing with a self-made ideal that she needed to satisfy the hunger of her nature for love and worship.  But it had no foundations, no support, and it was apt to vanish