But she knew the son’s mind also.  He had indeed himself told her all his mind.  ‘Of course I love her best of all,’ he had said.  When he told her of it she had been so overcome that she had wept in her despair;—­had wept in his presence.  She had declared to him her secret,—­that it had been her intention to become his wife, and then he had rejected her!  It had all been shame, and sorrow, and disappointment to her.  And she could not but remember that there had been a moment when she might have secured him by a word.  A look would have done it; a touch of her finger on that morning.  She had known then that he had intended to be in earnest,—­that he only waited for encouragement.  She had not given it because she had not wish to grasp too eagerly for the prize,—­and now the prize was gone!  She had said that she had spared him;—­but then she could afford to joke, thinking that he would surely come back to her.

She had begun her world with so fatal a mistake!  When she was quite young, when she was little more than a child but still not a child, she had given all her love to a man whom she soon found that it would be impossible she should ever marry.  He had offered to face the world with her, promising to do the best to smooth the rough places, and to soften the stones for her feet.  But she, young as she was, had felt that both he and she belonged to a class which could hardly endure poverty with contentment.  The grinding need for money, the absolute necessity of luxurious living, had been pressed upon her from her childhood.  She had seen it and acknowledged it, and had told him with precocious wisdom, that that which he offered to do for her sake would be a folly for them both.  She had not stinted the assurance of her love, but had told him that they must both turn aside and learn to love elsewhere.  He had done so, with too complete a readiness!  She had dreamed of a second love, which should obliterate the first,—­ which might still leave to her the memory of the romance of her earlier passion.  Then this boy had come her way!  With him all her ambition might have been satisfied.  She desired high rank and great wealth.  With him she might have had it all.  And then, too, though there would always be the memory of that early passion, yet she could in another fashion love this youth.  He was pleasant to her, and gracious;—­and she had told herself that if it should be so that this great fortune might be hers, she would atone to him fully for that past romance by the wife-like devotion of her life.  The cup had come within the reach of her fingers, but she had not grasped it.  Her happiness, her triumphs, her great success had been there, present to her, and she had dallied with her fortune.  There had been a day on which he had been all but at her feet, and on the next he had been prostrate at the feet of another.  He had even dared to tell her so,—­saying of that American that ’of course he loved her the best’!