much faith for sickness, death, or even terrible physical pain, to
be to her in any sense a poisoned wound. There are women like Rose whose
inner life can only be in peril from the pain and shame of the sin of
others. To them it is an intolerable agony to be troubled in their faith
in man.

Lady Charlton, swept out of the calm belonging to years of gentle
actions and ideal thoughts into a storm of indignation and horror, might
have lost all dignity and discretion if she had not been checked by
reverence for the dumb anguish and misery of her favourite daughter. She
had some notion of the thoughts that must pass in Rose's mind, now dull
and heavy, now alert and inflicting sudden deep incisions into the
quivering soul. Marriage had been to them both very sacred. They hated,
beyond most good women, anything that seemed to materialise or lower the
ideal. If there can be imagined a scale of standards for the relations
of men and women, of which Zola had not touched the extremity at one
end, the first place at the other extremity might be assigned to such
Englishwomen as Rose and her mother. The most subtle and amazingly high
motives had been assigned to Lord Charlton's most ordinary actions, and
happily he had been so ordinary a person that no impossible shock had
been given to the ideal built up about him. And it had not been
difficult or insincere to carry on something of the same illusion with
regard to the man who had won the Victoria Cross and had been very
popular with Tommy Atkins. David Bright's very reserves, the closed
doors in his domestic life, did not prevent, and indeed in some ways
helped, the process. The mother had known in the depth of her heart that
Rose was lonely, but then she was childless. Rose had never, even in
moments when the nameless mystery that was in her home oppressed her
most in its dull, voiceless way, tried to tell her mother what she did
not herself understand. Sir David had been courteous, gentle, attentive,
but never happy. Rose knew now that he had always been guiltily afraid.

Lady Charlton had had a few moments' warning of disaster, for she was
horrified at the change in Rose's face when she met her at the door of
the church after Evensong. She herself had been utterly soothed and
rested by the beauty of the service. There was so much that fitted in
with all her ideals in mourning the great soldier. Little phrases about
him and about Rose flitted through her mind. Widows were widows i