She shook her head: but how to tell her husband of the spectre who had risen before her in the house that was his, claiming the son who was his, his heir and not Carry’s, she did not know. Influence! she had been helpless by the side of the father, and in the depths of that dreadful experience Carry foresaw that the son, so like him, so moulded upon that man whom she had feared to the bottom of her heart, and alas! unwillingly hated, had now escaped her too. There are moments which are prophetic, and in which the feeblest vision sees clear. He had escaped her influence, if, indeed, he had ever acknowledged any influence of hers. As a child he had been obliged to obey her, and even as a youth the influence of the household--that decent, tranquil, graceful household at Easton--which henceforward Tom would compare so contemptuously with his own ‘place,’ and the wealth which was soon to be his--had kept him in a fashion of submission. But Tom had always looked at his mother with eyes in which defiance lurked: there had never been in them anything of that glamour with which some children regard their mother, finding in her their first ideal. It had always been a weariness to Tom to be confined to the restraint of her society. When they were children even, he and his sister had schemed together to escape from it. She was dimly aware that even Janet---- These things are hard for a mother to realise, but there are moments when they come upon her with all the certainty of fate. Her influence! She could have laughed or wept. As it was with the father, so would it be with the son. For that moment at least poor Carry’s perceptions were clear.