gentle with him when he came sometimes to call, respectfully, with a new tenderness of manner which she had never suspected. It might have weakened her will in the end and defeated her if she had not understood, as Sabine had done before her, that it was born in reality of his own vanity. He was being gentle with her now because she was the potential mother of his child, of his heir. At other times it maddened her to think that he should treat her gently and tenderly because there was the child to be considered. He had never thought of her at all. There had never been any real tenderness. She had suspicions too that it was only another way of attacking her will.
As for Hattie, the news appeared to change the whole tone and color of her life. Besides running the house she began to fuss and fidget over her Ellen. She recommended this and that; she was always advising her on the subject of prenatal influence. "You must remember," she said, "that I planned you should be a musician long before you were born. You can mold the whole life of the child."
She did not care whether the child was a girl or a boy. It was enough that she was to have a grandchild.
On the other side of the Atlantic, old Thérèse received only the calamitous news that there had been a separation. Instantly she had wound up her affairs, closed the house on Murray Hill and engaged a cabin. There was no time to be lost. Richard and Ellen must be reconciled at once. They must be brought together again. If this last chance failed, it would be the end of everything. There would be no more Callendars and no more men to care for the Callendar fortune and the ancient banking firm of Leopopulos et Cie. In an agony of uncertainty, the fat, bedizened, energetic old woman crossed the Atlantic and rushed by motor from Havre to Paris. In her heart, she had known all along that the marriage could not endure. She had played all her stakes on the chance that it would endure long enough to accomplish her purpose.
