have kept Amherst's love and have played a more
important part in his life; and brooding on the tragedy of the child's
sickly existence she resented the contrast of Cicely's brightness and
vigour. The result was that in her treatment of her daughter she
alternated between moments of exaggerated devotion and days of neglect,
never long happy away from the little girl, yet restless and
self-tormenting in her presence.

After her talk with Justine she felt more than usually disturbed, as she
always did when her unprofitable impulses of self-exposure had subsided.
Bessy's mind was not made for introspection, and chance had burdened it
with unintelligible problems. She felt herself the victim of
circumstances to which her imagination attributed the deliberate malice
that children ascribe to the furniture they run against in playing. This
helped her to cultivate a sense of helpless injury and to disdain in
advance the advice she was perpetually seeking. How absurd it was, for
instance, to suppose that a girl could understand the feelings of a
married woman! Justine's suggestion that she should humble herself still
farther to Amherst merely left in Bessy's mind a rankling sense of being
misunderstood and undervalued by those to whom she turned in her
extremity, and she said to herself, in a phrase that sounded well in her
own ears, that sooner or later every woman must learn to fight her
battles alone.

In this mood she entered the room where Cicely was at supper with her
governess, and enveloped the child in a whirl of passionate caresses.
But Cicely had inherited the soberer Westmore temper, and her mother's
spasmodic endearments always had a repressive effect on her. She
dutifully returned a small fraction of Bessy's kisses, and then, with an
air of relief, addressed herself once more to her bread and marmalade.

"You don't seem a bit glad to see me!" Bessy exclaimed, while the little
governess made a nervous pretence of being greatly amused at this
prodigious paradox, and Cicely, setting down her silver mug, asked
judicially: "Why should I be gladder than other days? It isn't a
birthday."

This Cordelia-like answer cut Bessy to the quick. "You horrid child to
say such a cruel thing when you know I love you better and better every
minute! But you don't care for me any longer because Justine has taken
you away from me!"

This last charge had sprung into her mind in the act of uttering it, but
now that it was spoken it