CHAPTER XXIII.

IN WHICH MR. BELCHER EXPRESSES HIS DETERMINATION TO BECOME A “FOUNDER,” BUT DROPS HIS NOUN IN FEAR OF A LITTLE VERB OF THE SAME NAME.

Mrs. Dillingham had a difficult role to play.  She could not break with Mr. Belcher without exposing her motives and bringing herself under unpleasant suspicion and surveillance.  She felt that the safety of her protege and his father would be best consulted by keeping peace with their enemy; yet every approach of the great scoundrel disgusted and humiliated her.  That side of her nature which had attracted and encouraged him was sleeping, and, under the new motives which were at work within her, she hoped that it would never wake.  She looked down the devious track of her past, counted over its unworthy and most unwomanly satisfactions, and wondered.  She looked back to a great wrong which she had once inflicted on an innocent man, with a self-condemnation so deep that all the womanhood within her rose into the purpose of reparation.

The boy whom she had called to her side, and fastened by an impassioned tenderness more powerful even than her wonderful art, had become to her a fountain of pure motives.  She had a right to love this child.  She owed a duty to him beyond any woman living.  Grasping her right, and acknowledging her duty—­a right and duty accorded to her by his nominal protector—­she would not have forfeited them for the world.  They soon became all that gave significance to her existence, and to them she determined that her life should be devoted.  To stand well with this boy, to be loved, admired and respected by him, to be to him all that a mother could be, to be guided by his pure and tender conscience toward her own reformation, to waken into something like life and nourish into something like strength the starved motherhood within her—­these became her dominant motives.

Mr. Belcher saw the change in her, but was too gross in his nature, too blind in his passion, and too vain in his imagined power, to comprehend it.  She was a woman, and had her whims, he thought.  Whims were evanescent, and this particular whim would pass away.  He was vexed by seeing the boy so constantly with her.  He met them walking together in the street, or straying in the park, hand in hand, or caught the lad looking at him from her window.  He could not doubt that all this intimacy was approved by Mr. Balfour.  Was she playing a deep game?  Could she play it for anybody but himself—­the man who had taken her heart by storm?  Her actions, however, even when interpreted by his self-conceit, gave him uneasiness.  She had grown to be very kind and considerate toward Mrs. Belcher.  Had this friendship moved her to crush the passion for her husband?  Ah! if she could only know how true he was to her in his untruthfulness!—­how faithful he was to her in his perjury!—­how he had saved himself for the ever-vanishing opportunity!