ery deep, but I see through him; and so would
you, if you chose. I never thought him so clever as you all did--but
that he should let that woman twist him round her little finger, and
give up everything for her!--I could not have supposed he would have
been so silly as that."

Mrs. Warrender made no reply except a brief reproof to her daughter
for speaking of Lady Markland as that woman. Perhaps she was herself a
little vexed with Lady Markland, though she was aware it was unjust. But
she was not vexed with Theo. She followed his foolishness (for to be
sure it was foolishness, poor boy!) with a warmth of sympathy such as
very rarely animates a mother in such circumstances. In her growing
anxiety about him, in the commotion of mind with which she had watched
the rising passion in his, there had been something which seemed to
Mrs. Warrender like a new vicarious life. She had been, as it were, the
spectator of this drama from the day when, to her great surprise, Theo
had urged, almost compelled her to offer her services and society to
the young widow. His vehemence then and a look in his eyes with which
she was noways acquainted, but of which, as a woman capable of similar
emotion, she divined the meaning, had awakened her, with a curious
upspringing of her whole being, to the study of this new thing, to see
what was going to come of it, and how it would develop. She had never
known in her own person what passion was; she had never been the object
of it, nor had she felt that wild and all-absorbing influence; but she
recognised it when she saw it in her son, with the keenest thrill of
sympathetic feeling. She watched him with a kind of envy, a kind of
admiration, a wondering enthusiasm, which absorbed her almost as much as
his love absorbed him. She who had been surrounded by dulness all her
life, mild affections, stagnant minds, an easy, humdrum attachment which
had all the external features of indifference,--it brought a curious
elation to her mind to see that her boy was capable of this flaming and
glowing passion. It had curbed her impatience as nothing else could have
done, and made her willing to wait and watch, to withstand the pressure
of the long monotonous days, and content herself with the dead quiet of
her life. She had not known even anxiety in the past. That of itself was
a vivifying influence now.

A little later Mrs. Warrender drove into Highcombe with Chatty, an
expedition which she had made several times