ded by Miss Carew, had
convinced herself that liberty would come, without any fight for it, at
twenty-one; so her view of the present was that it was a tiresome but
inevitable waiting for real life.

Miss Carew, watching her anxiously, could never find out what she had
thought since the night of the alarm; and if she had seen into her mind
at any one moment alone, she would have been misled. For Molly's
imagination flew from one extreme to another. At first, indeed, that
sentence, "Your mother's daughter ought to be more careful than other
girls," had seemed simply a revelation of evil of which she could not
doubt the truth. She saw in a flash why her mother had gone out of her
life although still living. The whole possibility of shame and horror
appeared to fit in with the facts of her secluded life with Mrs.
Carteret. A morbid fear as to her own birth seized on the poor child's
mind, and might have destroyed the healthier aspect of life for her
entirely; but happily Mrs. Carteret and the governess did think of this
danger, and showed some skill in laying the phantom. Some photographs of
John Dexter as a young man were brought out and shown to the governess
in Molly's presence, and her comments on the likeness to Molly were true
and sounded spontaneous. Relieved of this horror the girl's mind reacted
to the hope that Mrs. Carteret had only spoken in temper and spite,
grossly exaggerating some grievance against Molly's mother. Then was the
ideal restored to its pedestal, and expiatory offerings of sentiment of
the most elaborate kind hung round the image of the ill-used and
misunderstood, the beautiful, unattainable mother. If Miss Carew had
seen into the reveries of her pupil at such a moment, she would hardly
have believed how they alternated with the coldest fits of doubt and
scepticism. Molly was dealing with a self-made ideal that she needed to
satisfy the hunger of her nature for love and worship. But it had no
foundations, no support, and it was apt to vanish with a terrible
completeness. Then she would feel quite alone and horribly ashamed; she
would at moments think of herself as something degraded and to be
shunned. Some natures would have simply sunk into a nervous state of
depression, but Molly had great vitality and natural ambition. In her
ideal moments she thought of devoting her life to her mother; and the
ayah's words were still a text, "The faithful child will find a way."
But in darker hours she defie