ragged hole in her life left by Canning’s going.  Not till now, it seemed, had she realized to what measure her prince of lovers had twined himself into the reaches of her being.  To pluck him, at a word, from her heart would have been a difficult task at best, and it was made the more difficult for her in that she did not, at first, put her will into it.  For there had lingered in her a sort of stunned incredulity:  she could not quite believe that their quarrel had been irretrievable, that Hugo was gone forever.  In the four days’ waiting and hiding in New York, even after she had put the ocean definitely between them, she multiplied her woes by keeping the 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....