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Updated: July 22, 2025
At first Roger showed a certain apathy and brevity; he might have been fulfilling a task in which he took but small interest; even the details of chicanery and corruption connected with the trial were told without heat; he said nothing bitter of his wife avoided naming her, indeed, as much as possible. But when the tale was done he threw back his head with sudden animation and looked at Boyson.
If men like Herbert French, or Alfred Boyson, denounced her, there were many persons who felt warmly towards her and had cause. As she thought of them the tears rose in her eyes. Of course she could never make such things public. Outside the fog seemed to be lifting a little. There was a silvery light in the southeast, a gleam and radiance over the gorge.
Yet the compulsion of the dead was upon her, and of her scene with Boyson. What they asked of her Madeleine and Alfred Boyson was of course out of the question; the mere thought of that humiliating word "forgiveness" sent a tingle of passion through her. But was there no third course? something which might prove to all the world how full of resource and generosity a woman may be?
She felt oppressed and stifled; and though she had told Madeleine that she was going out in search of effects and spectacle, it was in truth the neighbourhood of Alfred Boyson which had made her restless. The road was lit at intervals by electric lamps, but after a time she found the passage of it not particularly easy.
She was most troubled, often, by certain episodes in the past, of which, she supposed Alfred Boyson knew least; the corrupt use she had made of her money; the false witnesses she had paid for; the bribes she had given. At the time it had seemed to her all part of the campaign, in the day's work.
As she clung to the wall, which alone separated her from the echoing gulf beyond, she could not prevent herself from thinking of Roger, Roger as he was when Alfred Boyson introduced him to her, when they first married, and she had been blissfully happy; happy in the possession of such a god-like creature, in the envy of other women, in the belief that he was growing more and more truly attached to her.
She had found herself in a milieu that demoralized her; her mind had become like "the dyer's hand, subdued to what it worked in." Now, she found herself thinking in a sudden terror, "If Alfred Boyson knew so and so!" or, as she looked down on Madeleine's dying face, "Could I even tell Madeleine that?" And then would come the dreary thought, "I shall never tell her anything any more.
Boyson spoke, the train had come in sight of the long flashing line of the Welland Canal, which wound its way, outlined by huge electric lamps, through the sunset and the fog, till the lights died in that northern distance where stretched the invisible shore of the great lake.
As she sat beside the patient, in the hours of narcotic sleep, when she relieved one of the nurses, she went often through times of great bitterness. She could not forgive the attack Captain Boyson had made upon her; yet she could not forget it. It had so far roused her moral sense that it led her to a perpetual brooding over the past, a perpetual re-statement of her own position.
"And that poor child has the management of it all?" he said at last, in a tone which did him credit. He himself had lost an only daughter at twenty-one, and he held old-fashioned views as to the helplessness of women. But Cecilia Boyson again misunderstood him. "Oh, yes!" she said, with a cool smile. "Everything is in her own hands everything! Mrs. Phillips would not dare to interfere.
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