Catherine’s eyes sought her friend’s.  They seemed to say mutely: 

“Be good to her, Beatrice, she is my mother.”

Then she closed the door behind the two.

People who have secrets, who find themselves hemmed into corners, who live perpetually over graves of the dead past, are seldom quite free from fear.  Mrs. Bertram had gone through tortures during the last couple of hours.  When she was alone with Beatrice she seized her hands, and drew her down to sit on the sofa by her side.  Her eyes asked a thousand questions, while her lips made use of some conventional commonplace.

Beatrice was after all an unsophisticated country girl.  She had never been trained in finesse; painful things had not come to her in the past of her life, either to conceal or avoid.  Now a terrible task was laid upon her, and she went straight to the point.

Mrs. Bertram said:  “You look tired, my dear future daughter.”

Beatrice made no reply to this.  She did not answer Mrs. Bertram’s lips, but responding to the hunger in her eyes, said: 

“I have got something to tell you.”

Then Mrs. Bertram dropped her mask.

“I feared something was wrong.  I guessed it from Loftie’s manner.  Go on, speak.  Tell me the worst.”

“I’m afraid I must give you pain.”

“What does a chit like you know of pain?  Go on, break your evil tidings.  Nay, I will break them for you.  There is to be no wedding tomorrow.”

“You are wrong.  There is.”

“Thank God.  Then I don’t care for anything else.  You are a true girl, Beatrice, you have truth in your eyes.  Thank God, you are faithful.  My son will have won a faithful wife.”

“I trust he will—­I think he will.  But—­”

“You need not be over modest, child.  I know you.  I see into your soul.  We women of the world, we deep schemers, we who have dallied with the blackness of lies, can see farther than another into the deep, pure well of truth.  I don’t flatter you, Beatrice, but I know you are true.”

“I am true, true to your son, and to you.  But Mrs. Bertram, don’t interrupt me.  In being true, I must give you pain.”

Again Mrs. Bertram’s dark brows drew together until they almost met.  Her heart beat fast.

“I am not very strong,” she said, in a sort of suffocating voice.  “You are concealing something; tell it to me at once.”

“I will.  Can you manage not to speak for a moment or two?”

“Go on, child.  Can I manage?  What have I not managed in the course of my dark life?  Go on.  Whatever you tell me will be a pin-prick, and I have had swords in my heart.”

“I am sorry,” began Beatrice.

“Don’t—­do you suppose I care for a girl’s sorrow!  The sorrow of an uncomprehending child?  Speak.”

“I have found out,” said Beatrice, in a slow voice, “just through an accident, although I believe God was at the bottom of it, something which has saved me from committing a great wrong, which has saved your son from becoming an absolute scoundrel, which has saved us both from a life of misery.”