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Updated: June 6, 2025
For the last few days, since his encounter with her portrait at Lightmark's studio, he had scarcely given her troubles a thought. When the girl saw him, after a startled look and movement, she seemed to shrink still further into the folds of her rusty black cloak, and, to avoid meeting Rainham's eyes, bent her head over the child who was seated at her side.
Rainham's heart, where her stepdaughter was concerned. She disapproved very thoroughly of Cecilia in every detail of her pretty face and delicate colouring, of the fair hair that rippled and curled and gleamed in a manner so light-hearted as to seem distinctly out of place in the dingy room, of the slender grace that was in vivid contrast to her own stoutness.
But now, in view of the change which the last fortnight had wrought in him, he could cherish no illusions; the worst that was possible was all now that one could expect. He was a charming, generous, clever fellow, and he was dying; that was a thing one could not get over. He moved across to the bedside, and Rainham's eyes suddenly opened.
But with further reflection and she was reflecting with passionate intensity this little glow-worm of hope expired. The truth! She knew it already had known before, almost instinctively that Philip Rainham's justification could only be the warrant of her husband's guilt; no corroboration of Oswyn's could make that dreary fact any plainer than it was already.
Before Rainham's death, Eve, in her private discussions of the situation, had generally concluded by dismissing the subject petulantly, with a summing-up only partially convincing, that everything would come right in the end; that in time that miserable scene would be forgotten or explained away; and that the old intimacy, of which it was at once so bitter and so pleasant to dream, would be restored.
Sylvester bestowed on the man who had been to her husband as a very dear younger brother had never furthered Rainham's advancement in her son's favour; and the manner in which Eve had centred her childish affections in Philip, who had made her his especial favourite, was even more prejudicial to his interests in that quarter.
She was quick and courteous and willing; responding, moreover, to the lash of the tongue after her first wide-eyed stare of utter amazement exactly as a well-bred colt responds to a deftly-used whip. "I'll keep her," was Mrs. Rainham's inward resolve. "And she'll earn her keep too!" There was no doubt that Cecilia did that.
"I had to come and tell you. Tommy, old thing I'm demobilized!" It was one of Mrs. Mark Rainham's grievances that, comparatively late in her married life, she should suddenly find herself brought into association with the children of her husband's first marriage.
Had things passed between them, things of which she was ignorant? Was the sentiment, then, reciprocal? She hardly believed it: Rainham's placid temper gave to his largest hostilities the character merely of languid contempt; it was not worth the trouble to hate anyone, he had said to her so often neither to hate nor to love.
Rainham's eyes that Cecilia had almost given up the attempt. She attacked her greasy mutton and sloppy cabbage in silence, unpleasantly conscious of her stepmother's freezing glance. Mrs. Rainham was a short, stout woman, with colourless, rather pinched features, and a wealth of glorious red hair.
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