It was a simple and sordid enough explanation in one sense, and it was
one of which Bettina had known, not one parallel, but several. Having
married to ensure himself power over unquestioned resources, the man had
felt himself disgustingly taken in, and avenged himself accordingly. In
him had been born the makings of a domestic tyrant who, even had he been
favoured by fortune, would have wreaked his humours upon the defenceless
things made his property by ties of blood and marriage, and who, being
unfavoured, would do worse. Betty could see what the years had held for
Rosy, and how her weakness and timidity had been considered as positive
assets. A woman who will cry when she is bullied, may be counted upon to
submit after she has cried. Rosy had submitted up to a certain point and
then, with the stubbornness of a weak creature, had stood at timid bay
for her young.

What Betty gathered was that, after the long and terrible illness which
had followed Ughtred's birth, she had risen from what had been so nearly
her deathbed, prostrated in both mind and body. Ughtred did not know all
that he revealed when he touched upon the time which he said his mother
could not quite remember--when she had sat for months staring vacantly
out of her window, trying to recall something terrible which had
happened, and which she wanted to tell her mother, if the day ever came
when she could write to her again. She had never remembered clearly the
details of the thing she had wanted to tell, and Nigel had insisted
that her fancy was part of her past delirium. He had said that at the
beginning of her delirium she had attacked and insulted his mother and
himself but they had excused her because they realised afterwards what
the cause of her excitement had been. For a long time she had been too
brokenly weak to question or disbelieve, but, later she had vaguely
known that he had been lying to her, though she could not refute what
he said. She recalled, in course of time, a horrible scene in which all
three of them had raved at each other, and she herself had shrieked and
laughed and hurled wild words at Nigel, and he had struck her. That she
knew and never forgot. She had been ill a year, her hair had fallen out,
her skin had faded and she had begun to feel like a nervous, tired old
woman instead of a girl. Girlhood, with all the past, had become unreal
and too far away to be more than a dream. Nothing had remained real but
Stornham and Nigel an