“I am sorry for the child, of course,” she said sadly, after weeping a little—­“who knows but she may have inherited her mother’s character?”

“The doctor said you were to be quiet, Angela,” remarked Kesiah, who had stood at the foot of the bed in the attitude of a Spartan.  “Jonathan, if you begin to excite her, you’d better go.”

“Oh, my boy, my darling boy,” sobbed Mrs. Gay, with her head on his shoulder, “I have but one comfort and that is the thought that you are so different—­that you will never shatter my faith in you.  If you only knew how thankful I am to feel that you are free from these dreadful weaknesses of men.”

Cowed by her helplessness, he looked down on her with shining eyes.

“Remember the poor devil loved you, mother, and be merciful to his memory,” he replied, touched, for the first time, by the thought of his uncle.

“I shall try, Jonathan, I shall try, though the very thought of evil is a distress to me,” she replied, with a saintly look.  “As for the girl, I have only the tenderest pity for the unfortunate creature.”

“That’s like you, mother.”

“Kesiah says that she has behaved very well.  Didn’t you say so, Kesiah?”

“Yes, Mr. Chamberlayne told me that she appeared perfectly indifferent when he spoke to her.  She even remarked, I believe, that she didn’t see that it concerned her.”

“Well, she’s spirit enough.  Now stop talking, mother, I am going.”

“God bless you, my darling boy—­you have never failed me.”

Instead of appeasing his conscience, the remark completed his descent into the state of disenchantment he had been approaching for hours.  The shock of his mother’s illness, coming after three days of marriage, had been too much for his unstable equilibrium, and he felt smothered by an oppression which, in some strange way, seemed closing upon him from without.  It was in the air—­in the faded cretonne of the room, in the grey flashes of the swallows from the eaves of the house, in the leafless boughs etched delicately against the orange light of the sky.  Like most adventurers of the emotions, he was given to swift despondencies as well as to vivid elations, and the tyranny of a mood was usually as absolute as it was brief.  The fact was there while it lasted like the physical sensation of hunger or gratification.  When it departed he seldom spurred his imagination to the pursuit of it.

“So it’s over,” he said under his breath, as he looked through the lacework of ivy on the small greenish panes to the desolate November fields, “and I’ve been a damn fool for the asking!”