So that was it, after all. Even his mother knew. Master of his nerves as he was, it blinded him for a moment. Presently he read on--the whole page--and lingered upon the words, that he might have time to think what he must say to Hylda. Nothing of the tragedy of his mother touched him, though he was faintly conscious of a revelation of a woman he had never known, whose hungering caresses had made him, as a child, rather peevish, when a fit of affection was not on him. Suddenly, as he read the lines touching himself, “Brilliant and able and unscrupulous.... and though he loves me little, as he loves you little too,” his eye lighted up with anger, his face became pale--yet he had borne the same truths from Faith without resentment, in the wood by the mill that other year. For a moment he stood infuriated, then, going to the fireplace, he dropped the letter on the coals, as Hylda, in horror, started forward to arrest his hand. “Oh, Eglington--but no--no! It is not honourable. It is proof of all!” He turned upon her slowly, his face rigid, a strange, cold light in his eyes. “If there is no more proof than that, you need not vex your mind,” he said, commanding his voice to evenness. A bitter anger was on him. His mother had read him through and through--he had not deceived her even; and she had given evidence against him to Hylda, who, he had ever thought, believed in him completely. Now there was added to the miserable tale, that first marriage, and the rights of David--David, the man who, he was convinced, had captured her imagination. Hurt vanity played a disproportionate part in this crisis. The effect on him had been different from what Hylda had anticipated. She had pictured him stricken and dumfounded by the blow. It had never occurred to her, it did not now, that he had known the truth; for, of course, to know the truth was to speak, to restore to David his own, to step down into the second and unconsidered place. After all, to her mind, there was no disgrace. The late Earl had married secretly, but he had been duly married, and he did not marry again until Mercy Claridge was dead. The only wrong was to David, whose grandfather had been even more to blame than his own father. She had looked to help Eglington in this moment, and now there seemed nothing for her to do. He was superior to the situation, though it was apparent in his pale face and rigid manner that he had been struck hard. She came near to him, but there was no encouragement to her to play that part which is a woman’s deepest right and joy and pain in one--to comfort her man in trouble, sorrow, or evil. Always, always, he stood alone, whatever the moment might be, leaving her nothing to do--“playing his own game with his own weapons,” as he had once put it. Yet there was strength in it too, and this came to her mind now, as though in excuse for whatever else there was in the situation which, against her will, repelled her. “I am so sorry for you,” she said at last.