ela had suffered! Dorchester
herself had had many moments when it had seemed that she had more to
control than her strength could maintain, but long custom, an entire
absence of the nervous system, and a comforting sense that she was,
after all, paid well for her trouble, sustained her endurance.

But Lady Adela had nothing.

The Duchess had always hated her children, but had used them,
magnificently, for her purposes. They had all been fools, but they were
just the kind of fools that the Beaminster tradition demanded.

Lady Adela had from the first been more of a fool than the others. She
had never had the gift of words and before her mother was, as a rule,
speechless, and it had been only by her changing colour that an onlooker
could have told that her mother's furies moved her.

Often Dorchester had attempted interference, but had found at last that
it was better to allow the fury to spend its force. Then also Dorchester
had noticed a curious thing. The Duke, Lord Richard, Lord John, Lady
Adela were proud of these prides and tempers. They were proud of
everything that their mother did; they might suffer, their backs might
wince under the blows, but it was part of the tradition that their
mother should thus behave.

Dorchester fancied that sometimes there was flashed upon them a sudden
suspicion that their mother was in these days only an old, ailing,
broken woman--no great figure now, no magnificent tyrant, no mysterious
queen of society. And then Dorchester fancied that she had noticed that
when such a suspicion had come upon them they had put it hastily aside
and locked it up and abused themselves for such baseness.

Curious people, these Beaminsters!

Well, it was no business of hers. And, perhaps, after all she had
herself some touch of that feeling, some fierce impatient pride in those
very tempests and rebellion. After all, was there anyone in the world
like this mistress of hers? Was there another woman who would bear so
bravely the pain that she bore? And was not that fierce clutch on life,
that energy with which she tried still to play her part in the great
game, grand in its own fashion?

Would not Dorchester also fight when her time came?

She looked across the firelight at her mistress. When would arrive the
inevitable moment of surrender? How imminent that moment when in the
eyes of all those about her the old woman would see that all that was
now hers was a quiet abandonment to death!

Well,