in the most quiet of the years that had passed--in one long dream
of peace as it seemed now; but never as now had she been met wherever
she turned by another and another lion in the way. She got up very
early, with a feeling that movement had something lulling and soothing
in it, and that to lie there a prey to all these thoughts was like lying
on the rack--to the great surprise of the kind landlady, who came
stealing into her room with the inevitable cup of tea, and whose inquiry
how the poor lady was, was taken out of her mouth by the unexpected
apparition of the supposed invalid, fully dressed, moving about the
room, with all the air of having been up for hours. Elinor asked, with a
sudden precaution, that the newspapers might be brought up to her, not
so much for her own satisfaction--for it made her heart sick to think
of reading over in dreadful print, as would be done that morning at
millions of breakfast-tables, her own words: perhaps with comments on
herself and her history, which might fall into Pippo's hands, and be
read by him before he knew: which was a sudden spur to herself and
evidence of the dread necessity of letting him know that story from her
own lips, which had not occurred to her before. She glanced over the
report with a sickening sense that all the privacy of sheltered life and
honourable silence was torn off from her, and that she was exposed as on
a pillory to the stare and the remarks of the world, and crushed the
paper away like a noxious thing into a drawer where the boy at least
would never find it. Vain thought! as if there was but one paper in the
world, as if he could not find it at every street corner, thrust into
his hand even as he walked along; but at all events for the moment he
would not see it, and she would have time--time to tell him before that
revelation could come in his way. She went down-stairs, with what a
tremor in her and sinking of her heart it would be impossible to say. To
have to condemn herself to her only child; to humble herself before him,
her boy, who thought there was no one like his mother; to let him know
that he had been deceived all his life, he who thought she had always
told him everything. Oh, poor mother! and oh, poor boy!

She was still sitting by the breakfast-table, waiting, in a chill fever,
if such a thing can be, for Philip, when a thing occurred which no one
could have thought of, and yet which was the most natural thing in the
world--which came