Mrs Clarendon received it, so to speak, full in the face, as she leaned forward, eagerly waiting for what Frances had to say. She looked at the girl aghast, the colour changing in her face, a sudden exclamation dying away in her throat. But after the first keen sensation, she drew herself together and regained her self-control. “Yes, yes,” she cried; “I understand. He could not enter into anything about us without telling you of--others. He was always full of good feeling--and so just! No doubt, he thought if you heard our side, you should hear the other. But when you were coming away--when he knew you must hear everything, what message did he give you for me?” In sight of the anxiety which shone in her aunt’s eyes, and the eager bend towards her of the rigid straight figure not used to any yielding, Frances began to feel as if she were the culprit. “Indeed,” she said, hesitating, “he never said anything. I came here in ignorance. I never knew I had a mother till Constance came--nor any relations. I heard of my aunt for the first time from--mamma; and then to conceal my ignorance, I asked Markham; I wanted no one to know.” It was some minutes before Mrs Clarendon spoke. Her eyes slowly filled with tears, as she kept them fixed upon Frances. The blow went very deep; it struck at illusions which were perhaps more dear than anything in her actual existence. “You heard of me for the first time from---- Oh, that was cruel, that was cruel of Edward,” she cried, clasping her hands together--“of me for the first time--and you had to ask Markham! And I, that was his favourite sister, and that never forgot him, never for a day!” Frances put her own soft young hands upon those which her aunt wrung convulsively together in the face of this sudden pang. “I think he had tried to forget his old life altogether,” she said; “or perhaps it was because he thought so much of it that he could not tell me--I was so ignorant! He would have been obliged to tell me so much, if he had told me anything. Aunt Caroline, I don’t think he meant to be unkind.” Mrs Clarendon shook her head; then she turned upon her comforter with a sort of indignation. “And you,” she said, “did you never want to know? Did you never wonder how it was that he was there, vegetating in a little foreign place, a man of his gifts? Did you never ask whom you belonged to, what friends you had at home? I am afraid,” she cried suddenly, rising to her feet, throwing off the girl’s hand, which had still held hers, “that you are like your mother in your heart as well as your face--a self-contained, self-satisfying creature. You cannot have been such a child to him as he had a right to, or you would have known all--all there was to know.”