Isabella Spencer also had adopted the tactics of silence.  When the scandalized Chiswicks, Aunt Jane at their head, tried to patch up the matter with argument and entreaty, Isabella met them stonily, seeming not to hear what they said, and making no response.  She worsted them totally.  As Aunt Jane said in disgust, “What can you do with a woman who won’t even talk?”

Five months after David Spencer had been turned from his wife’s door, Rachel was born.  Perhaps, if David had come to them then, with due penitence and humility, Isabella’s heart, softened by the pain and joy of her long and ardently desired motherhood might have cast out the rankling venom of resentment that had poisoned it and taken him back into it.  But David had not come; he gave no sign of knowing or caring that his once longed-for child had been born.

When Isabella was able to be about again, her pale face was harder than ever; and, had there been about her any one discerning enough to notice it, there was a subtle change in her bearing and manner.  A certain nervous expectancy, a fluttering restlessness was gone.  Isabella had ceased to hope secretly that her husband would yet come back.  She had in her secret soul thought he would; and she had meant to forgive him when she had humbled him sufficiently, and when he had abased himself as she considered he should.  But now she knew that he did not mean to sue for her forgiveness; and the hate that sprang out of her old love was a rank and speedy and persistent growth.

Rachel, from her earliest recollection, had been vaguely conscious of a difference between her own life and the lives of her playmates.  For a long time it puzzled her childish brain.  Finally, she reasoned it out that the difference consisted in the fact that they had fathers and she, Rachel Spencer, had none—­not even in the graveyard, as Carrie Bell and Lilian Boulter had.  Why was this?  Rachel went straight to her mother, put one little dimpled hand on Isabella Spencer’s knee, looked up with great searching blue eyes, and said gravely,

“Mother, why haven’t I got a father like the other little girls?”

Isabella Spencer laid aside her work, took the seven year old child on her lap, and told her the whole story in a few direct and bitter words that imprinted themselves indelibly on Rachel’s remembrance.  She understood clearly and hopelessly that she could never have a father—­that, in this respect, she must always be unlike other people.

“Your father cares nothing for you,” said Isabella Spencer in conclusion.  “He never did care.  You must never speak of him to anybody again.”

Rachel slipped silently from her mother’s knee and ran out to the Springtime garden with a full heart.  There she cried passionately over her mother’s last words.  It seemed to her a terrible thing that her father should not love her, and a cruel thing that she must never talk of him.