Evelyn was very still for a moment, and then she said:  “I’m very sorry for it all.  It must be some misunderstanding.”

“Of course, it is dreadful to be so disappointed in people.  But we have to learn.  I don’t know anything about his misunderstanding, but I did not misunderstand what he said.  At any rate, after such an exposition we can have no further intercourse with him.  You will not care to see any one who treated your mother in this way?  If you love me, you cannot be friendly with him.  I know you would not like to be.”

Evelyn did not reply for a moment.  Her silence revealed the fact to the shrewd woman that she had not intervened a day too soon.

“You promise me, dear, that you will put the whole thing out of your mind?” and she drew her daughter closer to her and kissed her.

And then Evelyn said slowly:  “I shall not have any friends whom you do not approve, but, mamma, I cannot be unjust in my mind.”

And Mrs. Mavick had the good sense not to press the question further.  She still regarded Evelyn as a child.  Her naivete, her simplicity, her ignorance of social conventions and of the worldly wisdom which to Mrs. Mavick was the sum of all knowledge misled her mother as to her power of discernment and her strength of character.  Indeed, Mrs. Mavick had only the slightest conception of that range of thought and feeling in which the girl habitually lived, and of the training which at the age of eighteen had given her discipline, and great maturity of judgment as well.  She would be obedient, but she was incapable of duplicity, and therefore she had said as plainly as possible that whatever the trouble might be she would not be unjust to Philip.

The interview with her mother left her in a very distressed state of mind.  It is a horrible disillusion when a girl begins to suspect that her mother is not sincere, and that her ideals of life are mean.  This knowledge may exist with the deepest affection—­indeed, in a noble mind, with an inward tenderness and an almost divine pity.  How many times have we seen a daughter loyal to a frivolous, worldly-minded, insincere mother, shielding her and exhibiting to the censorious world the utmost love and trust!

Evelyn was far from suspecting the extent of her mother’s duplicity, but her heart told her that an attempt had been made to mislead her, and that there must be some explanation of Philip’s conduct that would be consistent with her knowledge of his character.  And, as she endeavored to pierce this mystery, it dawned upon her that there had been a method in throwing her so much into the society of Lord Montague, and that it was unnatural that such a friend as Philip should be seen so seldom—­only twice since the days in Rivervale.  Naturally the very reverse of suspicious, she had been dreaming on things to come in the seclusion of her awakening womanhood, without the least notion that the freedom of her own soul was to be interfered with by any merely worldly demands.  But now things that had occurred, and that her mother had said, came back to her with a new meaning, and her trustful spirit was overwhelmed.  And there, in the silence of her chamber, began the fierce struggle between desire and what she called her duty—­a duty imposed from without.