had ever called my own? Money and riches they had told me were everything.'
'But they had told you wrong,' said Mrs. Orme, as she wiped the tears from her eyes.
'They had told me falsely. I had heard nothing but falsehoods from my youth upwards,' she answered fiercely. 'For myself I had not cared for these things; but why should not he have money and riches and land? His father had them to give over and above what had already made those sons and daughters so rich and proud. Why should not this other child also be his father's heir? Was he not as well born as they? was he not as fair a child? What did Rebekah do, Mrs. Orme? Did she not do worse; and did it not all go well with her? Why should my boy be an Ishmael? Why should I be treated as the bondwoman, and see my little one perish of thirst in this world's wilderness?'
'No Saviour had lived and died for the world in those days,' said Mrs. Orme.
'And no Saviour had lived and died for me,' said the wretched woman, almost shrieking in her despair. The lines of her face were terrible to be seen as she thus spoke, and an agony of anguish loaded her brow upon which Mrs. Orme was frightened to look. She fell on her knees before the wretched woman, and taking her by both her hands strove all she could to find some comfort for her.
'Ah, do not say so. Do not say that. Whatever may come, that misery—that worst of miseries need not oppress you. If that indeed were true!'
'It was true;—and how should it be otherwise?'
'But now,—now. It need not be true now. Lady Mason, for your soul's sake say that it is so now.'
'Mrs. Orme,' she said, speaking with a singular quiescence of tone after the violence of her last words, 'it seems to me that I care more for his soul than for my own. For myself I can bear even that. But if he were a castaway———!'
I will not attempt to report the words that passed between them for the next half-hour, for they concerned a matter which I may not dare to handle too closely in such pages as these. But Mrs. Orme still knelt there at her feet, pressing Lady Mason's hands, pressing against her knees, as with all the eagerness of true affection she endeavoured to bring her to a frame of mind that would admit of some comfort. But it all ended in this:—Let everything be told to Lucius, so that the first step back to honesty might be taken,—and then let them trust to Him whose mercy can ever temper the wind to the shorn lamb.
But, as Lady Mason had once said to herself, repentance will not come with a word. 'I cannot tell him,' she said at last. 'It is a thing impossible. I should die at his feet before the words were spoken.'
