‘Yes—­his own version of his married life.’

‘How do you know?  You cannot remember it,’ said Louis, though too well convinced, as he recollected the suppressed anguish, and the horror with which all blame of the young wife had been silenced.

’I have heard of it again and again.  It was an unhappy, ill-assorted marriage:  she was gay, he was cold.’

‘My Aunt Catharine says so?’

’As far as she can blame anything.  Your mother was a sweet blossom in a cold wind.  She loved and pitied her with all her heart.  Your aunt was talking, this very evening, of your father having carried her sister to Ormersfield, away from all her family, and one reason of her desire to go to Northwold is to see those who were with her at last.’

Louis was confounded.  ‘Yes!  I see,’ he said.  ’How obtuse not to read it in his own manner!  How much it explains!’ and he silently rested his brow on his hands.

’Depend upon it, there are two sides to the story.  I would not be a pretty, petted, admired girl in his keeping.’

‘Do you think it mends matters with me to fasten blame on either?’ said Louis, sadly.  ’No; I was realizing the perception of such a thread of misery woven into his life, and thinking how little I have felt for him.’

‘Endowing him with your own feelings, and then feeling for him!’

’No.  I cannot estimate his feeling.  He is of harder, firmer stuff than I; and for that very reason, I suspect, suffering is a more terrific thing.  I heard the doctors saying, when I bore pain badly, that it would probably do the less future harm:  a bad moral, but I believe it is true of the mental as of the physical constitution.’  Answering something between a look and a shrug of James, he mused on, aloud—­’I understand better what the wreck of affection must have been.’

‘For my part,’ said James, ’I do not believe in the affection that can tyrannize over and blight a woman.’

’Nay, James!  I cannot doubt.  My very name—­my having been called by it, are the more striking in one so fond of usage and precedent.  Things that passed between him and Mrs. Ponsonby while I was ill—­ much that I little regarded and ill requited—­show what force of love and grief there must have been.  The cold, grave manner, is the broken, inaccessible edge of the cliff rent asunder.’

’If romance softens the rough edge, you are welcome to it!  I may as well go to bed!’

’Not romance—­the sad reality of my poor father’s history.  I trust I shall never treat his wishes so lightly—­’

Impatient of one-sided sympathy, James exclaimed, ’As if you did not give way to him like a slave!’

‘Yes, like a slave,’ said Louis, gravely.  ’I wish to give way like a son who would try to comfort him for what he has undergone.’

’Now, I should have thought your feeling would have been for your mother!’