e small door of hope constantly open
against her lover's possible return. And oh, how wretched she was
through these days, how sorry, sorry for herself!

And mamma was enormously sorry for herself; and there they were, the
worst companions for each other that could possibly have been found in
the world. So they had sat down in London, in a modest family-hotel well
off the track of tourists and of fashion; for none knew better than
mamma when to draw the purse-strings tight, and the European tour,
planned as a triumphal progress, had been abased to a refuge and
rustication.

The average women in such a situation would, of course, quickly have
pooled their sorrows for mutual comfort; but these two were fixedly
held apart by their fundamental lack of sympathy with each other, and
further by the disciplinary character of mamma's attitude. Whatever she
wrote in her letters, Mrs. Heth's personal note was that Carlisle had
wilfully brought shame and disgrace upon her ever indulgent parents, and
she did not desire that the girl should be diverted for a moment from
the contemplation of her errors. In their quiet quarters, they saw
practically no one, did nothing but make themselves and each other as
miserable as they could. They fairly wallowed in their respective seas
of self-pity. And days passed when they hardly exchanged a word.

Of course so abject a surrender to the slings and arrows of outrageous
Fortune could not last indefinitely. Human nature's safety-valve is its
extraordinary resilience. Hope springs eternal, etc. Nevertheless, it
took a small shock or so to arouse these two women at the mill from
their spiritless prostration. One night in early July, Carlisle came
suddenly upon the name of Hugo Canning in the foreign tattle column of a
London newspaper. She read, with intense fixity of gaze, that Hugo was
in Europe: in short, that Hugo was enjoying himself at Trouville, where
he was constantly seen in the company of the Honorable Kitty Belden,
second daughter of So-and-So, and so forth....

All this time, Carlisle had been taking upon herself most of the blame
for the quarrel and break. She had been distracted and unreasonable; she
had never explained to Hugo sensibly how it had all happened; it was
only natural that he should have misunderstood and misjudged, and in the
end lost his temper and said hard things which he did not mean. And he
was suffering by it no less than she: oh, be sure of that.... Now, as
sh