Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/399

Rh “Has Mrs. Amherst not come in?” she asked, not knowing why she wished to ask it out of the child’s hearing.

“No, miss. I looked in myself to see—thinking she might have come by the side-door.”

“She may have gone to her sitting-room.”

“She’s not upstairs.”

They both paused. Then Justine said: “ What horse was she riding?”

“Impulse, Miss.” The butler looked at his large responsible watch. “It’s not late—” he said, more to himself than to her.

“No. Has she been riding Impulse lately?”

“No, Miss. Not since that day the mare nearly had her off. I understood Mr. Amherst did not wish it.”

Justine went back to Cicely and the fairy-tale.——As she took up the thread of the Princess’s adventures, she asked herself why she had ever had any hope of helping Bessy. The seeds of disaster were in the poor creature’s soul.… Even when she appeared to be moved, lifted out of herself, her escaping impulses were always dragged back to the magnetic centre of hard distrust and resistance that sometimes forms the core of soft—ﬁbred natures. As she had answered her husband’s previous appeal by her ﬂight to the woman he disliked, so she answered this one by riding the horse he feared.… Justine’s last illusions crumbled. The [ 383 ]