Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/274

Rh “Thank you,” he answered.

Their hands met mechanically, and she turned away and entered the house.

XVII

ESSY had not seen her little girl that day, and ﬁlled with compunction by Justine’s reminder, she hastened directly to the school-room.

Of late, in certain moods, her maternal tenderness had been clouded by a sense of uneasiness in the child’s presence, for Cicely was the argument most effectually used by Mr. Langhope and Mr. Tredegar in their efforts to check the triumph of Amherst’s ideas. Bessy, still unable to form an independent opinion on the harassing question of the mills, continued to oscillate between the views of the contending parties, now regarding Cicely as an innocent victim and herself as an unnatural mother, sacriﬁcing her child’s prospects to further Amherst’s enterprise, and now conscious of a vague animosity against the little girl, as the chief cause of the dissensions which had so soon clouded the skies of her second marriage. Then again, there were moments when Cicely’s rosy bloom reminded her bitterly of the child she had lost—the son on whom her ambitions had been ﬁxed. It seemed to her now that if their boy had lived she might have kept Amherst’s [ 258 ]