Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/144

 "Well, he isn't here now. At least I hope not. You—you haven't quarrelled, have you Dolly?"

"No—yes. I don't know. He—he asked me—oh, he was ridiculous. How I hate boys—and jealousy."

Mrs. Vandeleur shivered, then rose abruptly and closed the window against which she leaned, gazing down at the formless mass of the shrubs which cowered over their shadows on the lawn. Her mind, vaguely troubled for some days past, and now keenly on the alert, travelled swiftly back, bridging a space of nearly twenty years, to a scene strangely like this, in which she and her mother had held the stage. She too, a girl then of Dorothy's eighteen years, had brought the halting story of her doubts and scruples to her natural counsellor: she could remember still how the instinct of reticence had struggled with the yearning for sympathy, for the comfort of the confessional. She could recall now and appreciate her mother's tact and patient questioning, her own perversity, the dumbness which seemed independent of her own volition. A commonplace page of life. Two men at her feet, and the girl unskilled to read her heart: one had spoken—that was Dick Vandeleur, careless, brilliant, the heir to half a county; the other—her old friend; she could not bear to think of him now. Knowledge had come too late, and the light which made her wonder scornfully at her blindness. And her mother—she of course had played the worldly part; but her counsel had been honest, without bias: it were cruel to blame her now. Loyal though she was, Margaret Vandeleur had asked herself an hundred times, yielding to that love of threading a labyrinth which rules most women, what would have been the story of her life if she had steeled herself to stand or fall by her own judgment, if she had refused to allow her mother to drop into the wavering scale the words which had turned it, ever so slightly, in favour of the