ing into her mind a flood of
horrible light, of unimaginable bitterness. He must not know, he must
not know; and yet how was it to be kept from his knowledge? It was a
public thing; it could not be hid. It would be in all the papers, his
father's name: and the boy did not know he had a father living. And his
mother's evidence on behalf of her husband; and the boy thought she had
no husband.

This was what had been said to her again and again and again. Sometime
the boy must know--and she had pushed it from her angrily, indignantly
asking why should he know? though in the bottom of her own heart she too
was aware that it was the delusion of a fool, and that the time must
come---- But how could she ever have thought that it would come like
this, that the boy would discover his father through the summons of his
mother to a public court to defend her husband from a criminal
accusation? Oh, life that pardons nothing! Oh, severe, unchanging
heaven!--that this should be the way!

And then there came into Elinor's mind wild thoughts of flight. She
was not a woman whose nature it was to endure. When things became
intolerable to her she fled from them, as the reader knows; escaped,
shutting her ears to all advice and her heart to all thoughts except
that life had become intolerable, and that she could bear it no longer.
It is not easy to hold the balance even in such matters. Had Elinor
fulfilled what would appear to many her first duty, and stood by Phil
through neglect, ill-treatment, and misery, as she had vowed, for
better, for worse, she would by this time have been not only a wretched
but a deteriorated woman, and her son most probably would have been
injured both in his moral and intellectual being. What she had done was
not the abstract duty of her marriage vow, but it had been better--had
it not been better for them both? In such a question who is to be the
judge? And now again there came surging up into Elinor's veins the
impulse of flight. To take the boy and fly. She could take him where he
wished most to go, to the scenes of that literature and history of which
his schoolboy head was full, to the happiest ideal wandering, his mother
and he, two companions almost better than lovers. How his eyes would
brighten at the thought! among the summer seas, the golden islands, the
ideal countries--away from all the trouble and cares, all the burdens of
the past, all the fears of the future! Why should she be held by that
vil