ds
and heaving bosom to Foster's eager, hurried words. She had heard the
shouts of merriment, and faintly heard the screams, and had not even
looked to see the cause, but Felicie had found no inapt pupil. Inez
buried her face in her jeweled hands. Under the filmy veiling of her
dainty nightdress Dwight could see the pretty shoulders beginning to
heave convulsively. Was she sobbing? Stepping closer, he repeated the
question. "I _must_ know," said he.

"Ah, Oswald--how--how can I? You love him so! You love him so much more
than--me, and he--he hates me! He shrinks from me! He would not shrink
from--poisoning you--against me!"

"Inez, this is childish! Tell me at once what you know--why
you--distrust him?"

Again the sobs, the convulsive shoulder-heaving before she would speak,
and, as though fired with wrath inexpressible, Dwight started for the
door. Then she called him. Felicie was there, all distress, anxiety,
concern for Madame. Indeed, Monsieur should refrain--at such a time, and
then there were two to talk, each supplementing--reminding the other. It
was true that little Monsieur James could not seem to respond to the
love of his young mother, this angel, and he was rude and insolent to
Felicie, who adored him, and he--he so hurt and distressed Captain
Foster, who was goodness itself to him. It was for rudely, positively
contradicting the captain she, Inez, had been compelled to send James to
his room and require him to remain there until his father's return, not
thinking how long the father would be gone on his visit to town, and
even then James was obstinate; he would not apologize, although she had
striven, and Felicie, too, to make him understand how his father would
grieve that the son he so loved could so affront his guest; and they
feared, they feared James deceived sometimes his noble father. The
Naples incident was brought up again, and Jimmy's odd insistence that an
officer had spoken to and frightened her, and then--those little things
he had told on the homeward voyage (Heaven knows how true they were!)
and then, oh, it wrung their hearts to see the father's grief, but when
Jimmy denied all knowledge of the injury to Georgie Thornton, they knew
and Jimmy knew--he _must_ have known--it was his own doing. Leaving them
both in tears, the father flung himself from, the room and down the
stairs, and with his brain afire went straightway in search of his son.
Good God! To think that, after all his years of