had already involved so much of her
income, that it might be years--yes, he said _years_!--before she would
feel herself free again--free of her own fortune, of Cicely's
fortune...of the money poor Dick Westmore had meant his wife and child
to enjoy!

Justine listened anxiously to this confused outpouring of resentments.
Bessy's born incapacity for figures made it indeed possible that the
facts came on her as a surprise--that she had quite forgotten the
temporary reduction of her income, and had begun to imagine that what
she had saved in one direction was hers to spend in another. All this
was conceivable. But why had Mr. Tredegar drawn so dark a picture of the
future? Or was it only that, thwarted of her immediate desire, Bessy's
disappointment blackened the farthest verge of her horizon? Justine,
though aware of her friend's lack of perspective, suspected that a
conniving hand had helped to throw the prospect out of drawing....

Could it be possible, then, that Mr. Tredegar was among those who
desired a divorce? That the influences at which Mrs. Ansell had hinted
proceeded not only from Blanche Carbury and her group? Helpless amid
this rush of forebodings, Justine could do no more than soothe and
restrain--to reason would have been idle. She had never till now
realized how completely she had lost ground with Bessy.

"The humiliation--before my friends! Oh, I was warned...my father, every
one...for Cicely's sake I was warned...but I wouldn't listen--and _now_!
From the first it was all he cared for--in Europe, even, he was always
dragging me to factories. _Me?_--I was only the owner of Westmore! He
wanted power--power, that's all--when he lost it he left me...oh, I'm
glad now my baby is dead! Glad there's nothing between us--nothing,
nothing in the world to tie us together any longer!"

The disproportion between this violent grief and its trivial cause would
have struck Justine as simply grotesque, had she not understood that the
incident of the gymnasium, which followed with cumulative pressure on a
series of similar episodes, seemed to Bessy like the reaching out of a
retaliatory hand--a mocking reminder that she was still imprisoned in
the consequences of her unhappy marriage.

Such folly seemed past weeping for--it froze Justine's compassion into
disdain, till she remembered that the sources of our sorrow are
sometimes nobler than their means of expression, and that a baffled
unappeased love was perhaps the