Lady Millicent meanwhile looked on in silence; but, although apparently unmoved, she was, perhaps, nearer to giving way to a burst of sorrow than she had ever been in all her life before. It had, indeed, been a shock to her to learn that one of the ugliest of accusing words had been applied by a person on whom she looked down as the dust beneath her feet, to son of hers. The sight, also, of Horace--his face buried in his hands, and the tears trickling between his clenched fingers--acted, if not upon her heart, upon her nerves; and even as the melting of the winter’s snow tears up the stones most deeply buried in the torrent’s bed, Lady Millicent, moved by those hard-wrung drops to pity and to grief, could, had she yielded to one of the best and purest impulses she had ever known, have fallen on her son’s neck and wept aloud. For everything--turn which way she would, to the right hand or the left--everything at which she looked, whether in the past, the present, or the future, seemed against the unhappy woman who had so long hardened her heart and stiffened her neck against reproof. Her children--the sons and daughters whom, strange to say, she now, in the days of her defeat and in the hour of her humiliation discovered _were_ of some value in her sight--became to her as instruments of punishment. It was surprising to what extent the love of power, and the dread of abdicating to another the sceptre of her rule, had blinded this woman to a sense not only of her duties, but of her affections. The hope, the aim that she had so long in view, of still retaining within her grasp the dominion that she so dearly loved, had absorbed every faculty, both of mind and heart; but when that hope had vanished, and when the purpose of her life was at an end, then--when, with the natural yearning of every woman who still retains some of the characteristics of her sex, for an object on which to expend the hopes and fears, the energies and anticipations of a still vigorous mind, she turned with almost a passionately longing heart to the children whom God had given her--they in their turn refused the tardy boon thrown _faute de mieux_ for their acceptance. The children of Cecil Vavasour refused--tacitly, it is true, and with the firm protest of silent apathy--the offering of a mother’s interest in their affairs, a parent’s sympathy with their sorrows. Many a year too late there sounded, for those neglected children of a good and Christian father, the cry of nature in the breast of that world-hardened and power-loving woman. They could not--_could_ not love her. Like stunted trees, blighted by long exposure to cold winds and nipping frosts, the feeble sap within had ceased to rise, and no new shoots, no tender buds of love and tenderness, had opened beneath the warmth of maternal love, even as in the joyous spring the young leaves turn towards the sun their grateful tribute.