Suddenly he choked and got up and went away from her. She found nothing to say.
He was back again in a second, while she watched him helplessly.
"I don't want her to know," he said. "She must not know. What am I to do? She ought to enter this family as its loved and honoured daughter. Mother, I do not intend to give her up."
She had been waiting for it. If he had said otherwise she would have been bitterly disappointed, however much she might have tried to deceive herself. It was a pity, a thousand pities, the child could not have come to them without that smirch. But it had not touched her: there was no stain on her. Thinking upon Stella's mother she said to herself that no levity in the girl she had been had led to her downfall. Why, Shawn had said she was the simplest, whitest of creatures. It made Terence's sin all the blacker.
She drew her boy's head down to her and kissed it.
"I did not ask you to give her up," she said. "I do not take the world's view of such things."
He looked at her with an incredible incredulous relief.
"You angel mother!" he said with a deep sigh. "I might have trusted you. There is one thing. Stella must never know."
"She must never know," she repeated after him.
Her husband's foot sounded in the adjoining room and Terry went away comforted. Shawn did not come in to say good-night to her as usual, by which omission she conjectured the trouble of his mind. She prayed for light, almost in despair of finding it, and slept, although she had expected to lie awake, seeking unhappily a way out of this threatening sorrow for all dear to her.
She awoke somewhere in the small hours. The moon was on her bed and the air was very cold. She came awake suddenly, with a thought in her mind so concrete that it was as though some one had spoken it aloud.
"Is it quite certain that Terence did not marry Bridyeen Sweeney?"
She caught at it as a drowning man catches at a straw. Her heart gave a wild bound towards it. It was so thin, so frail a hope, that while her fingers closed upon it she knew the futility. Again she slept, and the thought was with her when she awoke in the grey morning.
She was grateful to the exigencies of the Service which made it absolutely necessary for Terry to be back in barracks next day. He had gone off after breakfast with Major Evelyn and Mr. Earnshaw, forbidding her to come to see him off. Sir Shawn, who was High Sheriff for the year and had to be in the county town for the opening of the Assizes, took the party to the station on his way. She was left with the morning on her hands.