would say, and he left in
ignorance of her punishment, she would not care what indignities
they might heap upon her. She had heard of penal servitude, of years,
terribly long, passed in all the misery of vile companionship; of
solitary confinement, and the dull madness which it engenders; of
all the terrors of a life spent under circumstances bearable only by
the uneducated, the rude, and the vile. But all this was as nothing
to her compared with the loss of honour to her son. "I should live,"
she would say; "but he would die. You cannot ask me to become his
murderer!"

It was on this point that they differed always. Mrs. Orme would
have had her confess everything to Lucius, and strove to make her
understand that if he were so told, the blow would fall less heavily
than it would do if the knowledge came to him from her conviction at
the trial. But the mother would not bring herself to believe that it
was absolutely necessary that he should ever know it. "There was the
property! Yes; but let the trial come, and if she were acquitted,
then let some arrangement be made about that. The lawyers might find
out some cause why it should be surrendered." But Mrs. Orme feared
that if the trial were over, and the criminal saved from justice,
the property would not be surrendered. And then how would that wish
of repentance be possible? After all was not that the one thing
necessary?

I will not say that Mrs. Orme in these days ever regretted that her
sympathy and friendship had been thus bestowed, but she frequently
acknowledged to herself that the position was too difficult for her.
There was no one whose assistance she could ask; for she felt that
she could not in this matter ask counsel from Sir Peregrine. She
herself was good, and pure, and straightminded, and simple in her
perception of right and wrong; but Lady Mason was greater than she in
force of character,--a stronger woman in every way, endowed with more
force of will, with more power of mind, with greater energy, and
a swifter flow of words. Sometimes she almost thought it would be
better that she should stay away from Orley Farm; but then she
had promised to be true to her wretched friend, and the mother's
solicitude for her son still softened the mother's heart.

In these days, till the evening came, Lucius Mason never made his way
into his mother's sitting-room, which indeed was the drawing-room of
the house,--and he and Mrs. Orme, as a rule, hardly ever met eac