A longer pause. Lavinia has put her elbows on the little Empire table that interposes its fragile elegance between her and her companion, and is digging her knuckles into the cheeks that are blazing with vicarious shame. “He said that--yes, I had rather tell you--that he was inexpressibly touched; but that in his busy life there was no room for feelings of that sort; that he was old enough to be her father; and that he had thought it right to destroy her letter.” Probably the dumb sympathy written so redly over Lavinia’s face is a better plaister for poor Mrs. Prince’s gaping wound than would have been any of the words that so absolutely refuse to come at the girl’s invocation. There are many ointments that soften the smart of death, of parting, of estrangement; but what physician or quack alive has ever yet invented a successful unguent for shame? “Even when I had read it, I did not take it in! I said to her, ‘Why have you shown me this? What does it mean? Where does it come from?’ ‘It came by the South African mail this morning,’ she said, looking me quite straight in the face, ‘and it is General ----’s answer to a letter I wrote him five weeks ago, offering myself to him.’” It is the measure of Miss Carew’s view of the situation, that the nearest approach to consolation which she can produce is the question, “Don’t you think she is out of her mind?” But the mother rejects even the extremely modest form of comfort thus offered to her. “Not more than she has always been!” adding ruefully, “She came too late in our lives--after twenty childless years! We had wished too much for her.” Both are silent, Lavinia throwing her eyes distressfully round the room, upon which Maple has worked his sumptuous will, in search of some phrase that may ring not too mockingly. She only succeeds in bringing home to herself the furious irony of the contrast between her companion’s upholstery and the wrinkled wretchedness of her face. Yet, after a moment of hopelessness, one of her propping hands drops down and hurries across the table to stroke the mourner’s sleeve, while her good eyes brighten at the thought that she has at last hit upon something really soothing to suggest. “It will never go any further! With a man like _him_, the soul of honour, her secret is certain to be sacred. Nobody but we need ever know it, and we will let it die as soon as we can.” “Nobody but we need ever know it!” repeats Mrs. Prince, with a shrill intonation of scornful woe. “That shows how little you know her! She herself will proclaim it on the housetops.” Then, with a sudden change of key, “She is coming this way--singing, if you please! Don’t you hear her? You must excuse me, I really can’t face her just yet.”