"It's not true! I won't believe it! You're all against me, all of you! His name is Nicholas Forrester! I tell you his name is Nicholas Forrester!" She broke into violent sobbing.

Mr. Shawyer looked greatly distressed. "No doubt it is all a misapprehension," he said. "There is some mistake in the name. It is not such a very uncommon name," he suggested. But he knew that it was.

"There is no mistake," Faith's mother insisted flintily. "If my daughter has married that man I will never forgive her to my dying day."

"Mother!" The word came from Faith in a heartbroken cry, and once more Mr. Shawyer rushed gallantly into the breach. "It is very unjust to my client to take this premature view," he said reprovingly. "Naturally, I know nothing of the circumstances of which you are now speaking, and we can only wait until Mr. Forrester comes home before they are proved or disproved. I speak of him as I have always found him, and I can truthfully say that your daughter will be perfectly safe and happy with him."

But for all notice Mrs. Ledley took, he might have spared himself the trouble of speech. Disappointment and sorrow had hardened her, and she could see nothing beyond the fact that her own child had married the man whom she herself most hated in all the world. Almost before Mr. Shawyer had finished speaking, she rose and took up her shabby little handbag.

"There is nothing more we need stay for," she said harshly. "Faith, dry your eyes and come home."

But Faith could only sob on in the bitterness of her heart: "It isn't true--I know it isn't true! And if it is--how did I know--how could I have known?"

Mrs. Ledley looked at her with hard eyes. "If you had cared for me at all," she said dully, "you would not have married him without my consent. I've been a good mother to you, and this is the reward I get. It was only of yourself you thought when you married him. You never thought of me at all."

Faith looked up, her face all flushed and quivering. "It was only of you I thought," she sobbed, "you and the twins. I wanted you to be rich--I wanted them to go to a good school and he promised and I knew he was rich!..."

Mrs. Ledley clenched her hand. "I would rather die than take a penny of his money," she said passionately. "Money made dishonestly--from the ruin of other men's lives."

Mr. Shawyer 

 Prev. P 32/130 next