"Just a moment, Inez. You had come home--you were on the veranda, I believe; did you see--anything of that--that trouble among the boys yesterday?"
She had seen nothing. She was listening at the moment with downcast lids and heaving bosom to Foster's eager, hurried words. She had heard the shouts of merriment, and faintly heard the screams, and had not even looked to see the cause, but Félicie had found no inapt pupil. Inez buried her face in her jeweled hands. Under the filmy veiling of her dainty nightdress Dwight could see the pretty shoulders beginning to heave convulsively. Was she sobbing? Stepping closer, he repeated the question. "I _must_ know," said he.
"Ah, Oswald--how--how can I? You love him so! You love him so much more than--me, and he--he hates me! He shrinks from me! He would not shrink from--poisoning you--against me!"
"Inez, this is childish! Tell me at once what you know--why you--distrust him?"
Again the sobs, the convulsive shoulder-heaving before she would speak, and, as though fired with wrath inexpressible, Dwight started for the door. Then she called him. Félicie was there, all distress, anxiety, concern for Madame. Indeed, Monsieur should refrain--at such a time, and then there were two to talk, each supplementing--reminding the other. It was true that little Monsieur James could not seem to respond to the love of his young mother, this angel, and he was rude and insolent to Félicie, who adored him, and he--he so hurt and distressed Captain Foster, who was goodness itself to him. It was for rudely, positively contradicting the captain she, Inez, had been compelled to send James to his room and require him to remain there until his father's return, not thinking how long the father would be gone on his visit to town, and even then James was obstinate; he would not apologize, although she had striven, and Félicie, too, to make him understand how his father would grieve that the son he so loved could so affront his guest; and they feared, they feared James deceived sometimes his noble father. The Naples incident was brought up again, and Jimmy's odd insistence that an officer had spoken to and frightened her, and then--those little things he had told on the homeward voyage (Heaven knows how true they were!) and then, oh, it wrung their hearts to see the father's grief, but when Jimmy denied all knowledge of the injury to Georgie Thornton, they knew and Jimmy knew--he _must_ have known--it was his own doing. Leaving them both in tears, the father flung himself from, the room and down the stairs, and with his brain afire went straightway in search of his son. Good God! To think that, after all his years of hope and prayer and faith and pride--of careful teaching and utter trust--that it should come to this, that the boy on whom his great heart was centered should after all--after all prove a coward and a liar! His eyes seemed clouded. He saw only as through a lurid glass. The sunlight in the crisp, delicious air was clear as crystal, yet there was a blur that seemed to overshadow every object. There was a ringing in his ears that dulled the sweet strains of the song his wife, his own wife, his love, his treasure, Jimmy's mother, used to sing, for now he never heard it. His temples throbbed; his head seemed burning, yet the face was ashen. The twitching lips, bitten into gashes, were blue between the savage teeth marks, and yet at sight of the straight, soldierly form he loved, little Jim had quit his fellows and, to the music of his mother's song--just as of old, beaming, joyous, confident, brimming over with fun and health--had come bounding to meet him.