'Find out what sort of fellow he is, Maurice,' said Stephen Haldane; 'it would be hard to see our little Norah throw herself away. I thought it would have been Ned.'
'Ned! Ned? Burton's son--a mere City fellow! Good heavens! has it come to that?' said Dr Maurice.
He left the Gatehouse, and walked slowly to the station, and went home just about the time when the dance began on the green. 'The child wants some one to take care of her,' he said over and over again to himself. When he got home he went over all his house, and looked at it with a half comic, half puzzled look. The idea perhaps had gleamed across his mind before; it was an idea he did not half like. It would be a trouble to him--more trouble than anybody could imagine. But still if such a sacrifice should be necessary--for Norah's sake.
The thought of revenge which had thus entered Helen's mind might have died out of it naturally, or it might have been overcome by better thoughts. All the passion and conflict of her life had died into stillness; six years had come and gone since the great storm had passed over her, which had changed her existence, and though that had not come to any satisfactory conclusion, but only raged itself out, leaving germs that might grow into tumultuous life again--so long an interval of quiet had buried these germs very deep. She had grown tranquil in spite of herself; the calm routine of her life had taken hold upon her, and she had made that change which is so imperceptible while in progress, so real and all-influencing when once accomplished--the change which steals away the individuality of existence, and introduces that life by proxy, to which we all--or at least to which, all women--must come. Insensibly, without knowing it, Helen had grafted herself into her child. She had lived for Norah, and now she lived in Norah, regarding the events of the world and the days as they passed solely in reference to the new creature who had a new career to weave out of them. This change has a wonderful effect upon the mind and being. Her sphere of interests was altered, her hopes and wishes were altered, her very modes of thought. The gravity of her nature gave way before this potent influence. Had she been in the way of it, Helen, who had lived through her own youth with a certain serious dignity, accepting her pleasures as a necessity rather than entering into them with enthusiasm, would have acquired for herself, no doubt, the character of a frivolous woman, fond of balls and gaiety, all because of the gayer temper of her child. She felt with Norah that thrill of wonder about Cyril Rivers; her own heart began to beat a little quicker when she heard him coming; a reflection of Norah's blush passed over her. She had to make an effort now and then not to be altogether carried away by this strange entry she had made into another nature; for Norah was not like her mother in nature; training and constant association had made them alike, and it was quite possible that Norah in later life might become Helen, as Helen for the moment had become Norah. But this wondrous double life that ebbs and flows from one heart to another as from one vessel to another--the same blood, the same soul--is not very explicable in words. It was only when Helen sat, as she did at the moment we are now describing, all by herself over her little fire, and felt the silence round her, and realized her own individuality separate from the rest of the world, that the old strain of her thoughts came back to her, and for half an hour at a time she became herself once more.