'It is a dull, horrid place, and I was bored to death there!' she said,
when Mary asked how she had enjoyed herself. 'There was no question of
enjoyment. Grandmother took it into her head that I was looking ill, and
sent me to the sea; but I should have been just as well at Fellside.'
This meant that between Lesbia and that distinctly inferior being, her
younger sister, there was to be no confidence. Mary had watched the
life-drama acted under her eyes too closely not to know all about it,
and was not inclined to be so put off.
That pale perturbed countenance of John Hammond's, those eager inquiring
eyes looking to the door which opened not, had haunted Mary's waking
thoughts, had even mingled with the tangled web of her dreams. Oh, how
could any woman scorn such love? To be so loved, and by such a man,
seemed to Mary the perfection of earthly bliss. She had never been
educated up to those wider and loftier views of life, which teach a
woman that houses and lands, place and power, are the supreme good.
'I can't understand how you could treat that noble-minded man so badly,'
she exclaimed one day, when she and Lesbia were alone in the library,
and after she had sat for ever so long, staring out of the window,
meditating upon her sister's cruelty.
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