a bright fire, had set a couple of
softly cushioned chairs side by side, as though the physical comfort
would reach the wounded spirit. She smiled to herself rather piteously
at the thought. Men were susceptible to comfort, to being petted, no
matter at what age one loved them, or in what grief one would comfort
them.

She was in her silk dressing gown, her hair in two long plaits before
Terry came. Despite his miserable preoccupation his face lightened at
sight of her.

"How sweet you look, Mother!" he said. "And so young with your hair
like that."

"Come and sit down, my darling boy."

He came and sat by her, and presently he laid his face on her shoulder
to conceal, she divined, set eyes.

"What am I to do, Mothereen, at all, at all?" he asked, going back to
the phraseology of his nursery days.

"Your father has told you?"

"Yes, he has told me."

"It is pretty bad," she said compassionately.

"Mother," he lifted his face and his eyes were bloodshot. "Why did you
call me after that villain? Why does my father love him still? I have
never heard you say one word against him."

She flinched before the accusation.

"Dear," she said. "I have only just been told of this. Your father
kept it from me all those years."

"And you were engaged to him at the time! Good Lord!" he broke out
with young passion. "Don't tell me, Mother, that there is any excuse
for him. I could not bear that from you. One law for the man, another
for the woman: it is the easy way of the world. My poor little
darling!"

Suddenly he choked and got up and went away from her. She found
nothing to say.

He was back again in a second, while she watched him helplessly.

"I don't want her to know," he said. "She must not know. What am I to
do? She ought to enter this family as its loved and honoured daughter.
Mother, I do not intend to give her up."

She had been waiting for it. If he had said otherwise she would have
been bitterly disappointed, however much she might have tried to
deceive herself. It was a pity, a thousand pities, the child could not
have come to them without that smirch. But it had not touched her:
there was no stain on her. Thinking upon Stella's mother she said to
herself that no levity in the girl she had been had led to her
downfall. Why, Shawn had said she was the simplest, whitest of
creatures. It made Terence's sin all the blacker.

She drew her boy's head down to her and kissed it.