Hester used to come continually to inquire after her brother, and there was something in her way that always made me shudder when she asked after him.  I knew she could not wish for his life, and gloated over all the reports she could collect of his weakness.  I felt more and more horror of her; God forgive me for not having tried not to hate her.  I sometimes doubt whether my dread and distrust were not visible, and may not have put it into her head.

And then came Mr. Decies, again and again.  He was faithful—­I see it now.  He cared not if I had neither name nor fortune; he held fast to his proposals.  And I?  Oh, I was absorbed—­I was universally defiant—­I did not do him justice in the bitterness I did not realise.  I thought he was constant only out of honour and pity, and I did not choose to open my heart to understand his pleadings or accept them as earnest—­I was harsh.  Oh, how little one knows what one is doing!  Too proud to be grateful—­that was actually my case.  I was enamoured of the blue-spectacle plan; I had romances of watching Alured day and night, and pouring away dangerous draughts.  The very fancy, I see now, was playing with edged tools; I feel as if my imagination had put the possibility into the very air.

Once indeed—­when Jaquetta had been telling me she did not understand my unkindness; and observed that, even for Alured’s sake, she could not see why I did not accept—­I did begin to regard him as a possible protector for the boy.  But no; the blue spectacles would be the more assiduous guardian, said my foolish fancy.

Before I had thought it over into sense or reason, Fulk came back from Paris.  He had not been really crushed till now.  He was white, and silent, and resolute, and very gentle; all excitement of manner gone.  He did not say one word, but we knew it was all over with him, and that he could not have had one scrap of comfort or hope.

Nor had he, though even to me he told nothing, till we were together in the dark one evening, much later.  He did insist upon seeing Emily; but her mother would not leave her, or take her eyes off her, and the timid thing did nothing but sob and cry, in utter helplessness and shame, and never even gave him a look.

It was not the being neglected and cast off that he felt as such a wrong, to both himself and Emily, but the being drawn on with false hopes and promises to expect that she was to belong to him, after all; and he was cruelly disappointed that Emily had not energy to cling to him—­he had made so sure of her.

Bertram and Jaquetta had expected all along that he would be the more eager to be off to the Antipodes when everything was swept away from him here, and he did sit after dinner talking it over in a business-like way, while Bertram gave him all the information he had been collecting in his absence.

I would not listen.  I was determined against going away from my charge; I had rather have been his housemaid than have left him to Hester, and I must have looked like a stone as I got up, and left them to their talk while I went back to the boy.