CHAPTER VI

MOLLY COMES OF AGE


For some time after that terrible night Molly never spoke to Mrs.
Carteret unless it were absolutely necessary. It may be difficult to
believe that no explanation was sought or given and after a time things
seemed to be much as before. The silence of a brooding nature is a
terrible thing; and it is more common in narrow, dull lives than in any
other. Uneducated men and women in villages, or servants cramped
together in one house, I have known to brood over some injury in an
awful silence for twenty or thirty years. If Molly's future life had
been in Mrs. Carteret's hands, the sense of wrong would have burrowed
deeper and been even better hidden, but Molly, aided by Miss Carew, had
convinced herself that liberty would come, without any fight for it, at
twenty-one; so her view of the present was that it was a tiresome but
inevitable waiting for real life.

Miss Carew, watching her anxiously, could never find out what she had
thought since the night of the alarm; and if she had seen into her mind
at any one moment alone, she would have been misled. For Molly's
imagination flew from one extreme to another. At first, indeed, that
sentence, "Your mother's daughter ought to be more careful than other
girls," had seemed simply a revelation of evil of which she could not
doubt the truth. She saw in a flash why her mother had gone out of her
life although still living. The whole possibility of shame and horror
appeared to fit in with the facts of her secluded life with Mrs.
Carteret. A morbid fear as to her own birth seized on the poor child's
mind, and might have destroyed the healthier aspect of life for her