“When he turned you out, like any drab of the streets!” bellowed old Anthony.  “He never cared for you.  He married you to revenge himself on me.  He sent you back here for the same reason.  He’ll take your child, and break its spirit and ruin its body, for the same reason.  The man’s a maniac.”

But again, as on the night she came, he found himself helpless against Elinor’s quiet impassivity.  He knew that, let Jim Doyle so much as raise a beckoning finger, and she would go to him.  He did not realize that Elinor had inherited from her quiet mother the dog-like quality of love in spite of cruelty.  To Howard he stormed.  He considered Elinor’s infatuation indecent.  She was not a Cardew.  The Cardew women had some pride.  And Howard, his handsome figure draped negligently against the library mantel, would puzzle over it, too.

“I’m blessed if I understand it,” he would say.

Elinor’s child had been a boy, and old Anthony found some balm in Gilead.  Jim Doyle had not raised a finger to beckon, and if he knew of his son, he made no sign.  Anthony still ignored Elinor, but he saw in her child the third generation of Cardews.  Lily he had never counted.  He took steps to give the child the Cardew name, and the fact was announced in the newspapers.  Then one day Elinor went out, and did not come back.  It was something Anthony Cardew had not counted on, that a woman could love a man more than her child.

“I simply had to do it, father,” she wrote.  “You won’t understand, of course.  I love him, father.  Terribly.  And he loves me in his way, even when he is unfaithful to me.  I know he has been that.  Perhaps if you had wanted me at home it would have been different.  But it kills me to leave the baby.  The only reason I can bring myself to do it is that, the way things are, I cannot give him the things he ought to have.  And Jim does not seem to want him.  He has never seen him, for one thing.  Besides—­I am being honest—­ I don’t think the atmosphere of the way we live would be good for a boy.”

There was a letter to Grace, too, a wild hysterical document, filled with instructions for the baby’s care.  A wet nurse, for one thing.  Grace read it with tears in her eyes, but Anthony saw in it only the ravings of a weak and unbalanced woman.

He never forgave Elinor, and once more the little grocer’s curse thwarted his ambitions.  For, deprived of its mother’s milk, the baby died.  Old Anthony sometimes wondered if that, too, had been calculated, a part of the Doyle revenge.

CHAPTER IV