iety to the occasion by remarking: 'What did I tell you?'
The girl's proud and tenacious spirit, weakened by the long strain, was
daunted at last. She lounged in the house and garden, listless, supine,
torpid, instinctively waiting for Nature's recovery.

Millicent alone in the house was unreservedly cheerful and
light-hearted. She had the advantage of Mr. Corfe's instruction for two
hours every Wednesday, and expressed herself as well satisfied with his
methods. Her own intimate friends knew that she quite intended to go on
the stage, but they were enjoined to say nothing. Consequently John
Stanway was one of the few people in Bursley unaware of the definiteness
of Milly's private plans; Leonora was another. Leonora sometimes felt
that Milly's assertive and indestructible vivacity must be due to some
specific cause, but Mr. Cecil Corfe's reputation for seriousness and
discretion precluded the idea that he was encouraging the girl to dream
dreams without the consent of her parents.

Leonora might have questioned Milly, but she perceived the futility of
doing so. It became more and more clear to her that she did not possess
the confidence of her daughters. They loved her and they admired her;
and she for her part made a point of trusting them; but their confidence
was withheld. Under the influence of Arthur Twemlow she had tried to
assuage the customary asperities of home life, so far as possible, by a
demeanour of generous quick acquiescence, and she had not entirely
failed. Yet the girls, with all the obtuseness and insensibility of
adolescence, never thought of giving her the one reward which she
desired. She sought tremulously to win their intimacy, but she sought
too late. Rose and Milly simply ignored her diffident advances, and even
Ethel was not responsive. Leonora had trained up her children as she
herself had been trained. She saw her error only when it could not be
retrieved. The dear but transient vision of four women who had no
secrets from each other, who understood each other, was finally
dissolved.

Amid the secret desolation of a life which however was not without love,
amid her vain regrets for an irrecoverable youth and her horror of the
approach of age, amid the empty lassitudes which apparently were all
that remained of the excitement caused by Arthur Twemlow's presence,
Leonora found a mournful and sweet pleasure in imagining that she had a
son. This son combined the best qualities of Harry Burges