'It has happened to me; mother, your daughter has wrecked your peace
for ever!'

'And he has abandoned you?'

'No, no; I told you it was I who left him.'

It was Mrs Hopgood's custom, when any evil news was suddenly
communicated to her, to withdraw at once if possible to her own room.
She detached herself from Madge, rose, and, without a word, went
upstairs and locked her door. The struggle was terrible. So much
thought, so much care, such an education, such noble qualities, and
they had not accomplished what ordinary ignorant Fenmarket mothers
and daughters were able to achieve! This fine life, then, was a
failure, and a perfect example of literary and artistic training had
gone the way of the common wenches whose affiliation cases figured in
the county newspaper. She was shaken and bewildered. She was
neither orthodox nor secular. She was too strong to be afraid that
what she disbelieved could be true, and yet a fatal weakness had been
disclosed in what had been set up as its substitute. She could not
treat her child as a sinner who was to be tortured into something
like madness by immitigable punishment, but, on the other hand, she
felt that this sorrow was unlike other sorrows and that it could
never be healed. For some time she was powerless, blown this way and
that way by contradictory storms, and unable to determine herself to
any point whatever. She was not, however, new to the tempest. She
had lived and had survived when she thought she must have gone down.
She had learned the wisdom which the passage through desperate
straits can bring. At last she prayed and in a few minutes a message
was whispered to her. She went into the breakfast-room and seated