'Oh, we shall have her mild as a sheep.' (Eustacie set her teeth.)
'Every one will be in the same story, that her marriage was a
nullity; she cannot choose but believe, and can only be thankful
that we overlook the escapade and rehabilitate her.'

'Thank you, my good uncle,' almost uttered his unseen auditor.

'Well! There is too much land down here to throw away; but the
affair has become horribly complicated and distasteful.'

'No such thing. All the easier. She can no longer play the
spotless saint--get weak-minded priests on her side--be all for
strict convents. No, no; her time for that is past! Shut her up
with trustworthy persons from whom she will hear nothing from
without, and she will understand her case. The child? It will
scarce be born alive, or at any rate she need not know whether it
is. Then, with no resource, no hope, what can she do but be too
thankful for pardon, and as glad to conceal the past as we could
wish?'

Eustacie clenched her fist. Had a pistol been within her reach,
the speaker's tenure of life had been short! She was no chastened,
self-restrained, forgiving saint, the poor little thing, only a
hot-tempered, generous, keenly-sensitive being, well-nigh a child
in years and in impulses, though with the instincts of a mother
awakening within her, and of a mother who heard the life of her
unborn babe plotted against. She was absolutely forced to hold her
lips together, to repress the sobbing scream of fury that came to
her throat; and the struggles with her gasping breath, the surging
of the blood in her ears, hindered her from hearing or seeing