“A woman?” she said, with a scarlet blush of trouble and shame. The first intrusion of this possibility daunts and terrifies a mother. A woman! what does that mean?--not the pure and delicate love with which all her thoughts would be in sympathy; something very different. The shock of separation between the boy, the heir of all her hopes, and a man half-known, who is no longer the child of her bosom, was almost more than she could bear. The cry she gave echoed low but bitter through the empty passages, where many such have echoed, audible or inaudible, before. CHAPTER XII. “I cannot move him one step from his resolution,” said Lady Markham, pressing her hands over her eyes. They were aching with tears, with the sleeplessness of the past night, and that burning of anxiety which is worse than either. “He does not seem to care for what I say to him. His mind is made up, he declares. God help us! William, our eldest boy! And he used to be so good, so affectionate; but now he will not listen to a word I say.” They were in a room in the hotel, one of those bare and loveless rooms, denuded of everything that is warm or homelike, in which so often the bitterest scenes of the tragedy of our life take place. Lady Markham sat by the bare table; Sir William paced up and down between that and the door. Outside was all the commotion of one of those big caravanserai which have become so common in England, echoes of noisy parties below, and a constant passage up and down of many feet. Trouble itself is made harder vulgarised by such contact. They were far too much absorbed to think of this, yet it made them a little more miserable unawares. “Does he mean to marry her?” Sir William said. “Oh!” cried Lady Markham, with a start as if she had received a blow; “I cannot think it is that. He will not allow it is that. It is, what he has always said, those new principles, those revolutionary ideas, I do not know what those men are worthy of who fill a boy’s head with ridiculous theories, who teach him to despise his home.” “There are few who are much harmed by that. Isabel you must not be squeamish. You must forget you are a delicate lady, and speak plainly. I know what a young man is at Paul’s age; they can hold the wildest theories without feeling any necessity to act upon them. It is a privilege of youth; but against that other kind of influence, they are helpless. And a woman like you does not understand the arts and the wiles of these others. And he does not know how important it is,” said Sir William, with a piteous tone in his voice; “he does not know----”