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In this keen complication of feeling, Mrs. Hayward, for the time, could realise nothing else. It was not possible to think of the dead girl and herself but as rivals: and this, too, gave her a pang. How mean, how ungenerous, how miserable it was! Such a story in a book, much more in real life, would have moved her to warm tears; but in this, which touched herself so closely, she could feel no true pity. It was her rival; it was one who had come before her, whose shadow had lain upon her life and darkened it, who even now was bringing trouble into it—trouble of which it was impossible to fathom the full extent. How could there be tenderness where such sharp antagonism was? And yet, how poor, how small, how petty, how unworthy was the feeling!

In these contrarieties her mind was caught, and thrilled with sharp vexation, shame, scorn of herself, and sense of that profound vanity of human things which makes the present in its pettiness so much greater than the past, and dims and obliterates everything that is over. To think that such a tragedy had been, and that those who were most concerned thought of their poor share in it first, and not of her who was the victim! That contradiction of all that was most true and just, that infidelity which is in every human thing, the callousness and egotism which ran through the best, jarred her with a discord which was in herself as well as in all the rest. But when she had cried her heart out, Mrs. Hayward, as was natural, exhausted that first poignant sensation, and came to contemplate, apart from all that was past, the present condition of affairs, which was not more consolatory. Indeed, when, putting the tragedy of the poor Joyce who was dead out of her mind, she returned to the present, the figure of the living Joyce suddenly rose before her with a sharp distinctness that made her spring to her feet as a soldier springs to his weapon when suddenly confronted by an enemy. Mrs. Hayward had never seen Joyce, so that this figure was purely imaginary which rose before her, with a stinging touch, reminding her that here was something which was not past but present, a reality,—no affair of memory or sentiment, but a difficulty real and tangible, standing straight before her, not to be passed by or forgotten. She sprang up as if to arms, to meet the new antagonist who thus presented herself, and must be met, but not with arms in hand, nor as an antagonist at all. Joyce herself would scarcely have been so terrible to encounter as Joyce’s child thus coming between her husband and herself, taking possession of the foreground of their existence whether they would or not. What Mrs. Hayward would be called upon to do would be—not to retire before this new actor in her existence, not to withdraw and leave the field as she had always felt it possible she might have to do, but to receive, to live with,—good heavens! perhaps to love her! Yes! no doubt this was what the Colonel would want; he would require her to love this girl who was his child. He would take it for granted that she must do so; he would innocently lay all the burden upon her, and force her into a maternity which nature had not required of her. A mother! ah yes, she could have been a mother indeed had God willed it so; but to produce that undeveloped side of her, that capacity which she had been so often tempted to think Providence had wronged her by leaving in abeyance, for the benefit of this country girl, this Scotch peasant, with all her crude education, her conceit (no doubt) of superiority, her odious schoolmistress’s training!