"Hush! You must not utter that word again;" and Mrs. Dinneford put
her fingers on Edith's lips. "The wretched man you once called by
that name is a disgraced criminal. It is better that you know the
worst."

When Mr. Dinneford came home, instead of the quiet, happy child he
had left in the morning, he found a sad, almost broken-hearted
woman, refusing to be comforted. The wonder was that under the shock
of this terrible awakening, reason had not been again and hopelessly
dethroned.

After a period of intense suffering, pain seemed to deaden
sensibility. She grew calm and passive. And now Mrs. Dinneford set
herself to the completion of the work she had begun. She had
compassed the ruin of Granger in order to make a divorce possible;
she had cast the baby adrift that no sign of the social disgrace
might remain as an impediment to her first ambition. She would yet
see her daughter in the position to which she had from the beginning
resolved to lift her, cost what it might. But the task was not to be
an easy one.

After a period of intense suffering, as we have said, Edith grew
calm and passive. But she was never at ease with her mother, and
seemed to be afraid of her. To her father she was tender and
confiding. Mrs. Dinneford soon saw that if Edith's consent to a
divorce from her husband was to be obtained, it must come through
her father's influence; for if she but hinted at the subject, it was
met with a flash of almost indignant rejection. So her first work
was to bring her husband over to her side. This was not difficult,