Then she
suddenly got up and, from a drawer, took out two things--an old
photograph of her mother at the time of her marriage, and Carmen's
guitar, which she had made her own on the day after the flight, and had
kept hidden ever since. She lay on the bed with her cheek pressed to the
guitar, and her eyes hungrily feeding on the face of a woman whose beauty
belonged to spheres other than where she had spent the thirteen years of
her married life.
Zoe had understood more even at the time of the crisis than they thought
she did, child though she was; and as the years had gone on she had
grasped the meaning of it all more clearly perhaps than anyone at all
except her adored friends Judge Carcasson, at whose home she had visited
in Montreal, and M. Fille.
The thing last rumoured about her mother in the parish was that she had
become an actress. To this Zoe made no protest in her mind. It was better
than many other possibilities, and she fixed her mind on it, so saving
herself from other agonizing speculations. In a fixed imagination lay
safety. In her soul she knew that, no matter what happened, her mother
would never return to the Manor Cartier.
The years had not deepened confidence between father and daughter. A
shadow hung between them. They laughed and talked together, were even
boisterous in their fun sometimes, and yet in the eyes of both was the
forbidden thing--the deserted city into which they could not enter.
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