After a pause he answered: "Very well." Another pause, then: "Our engagement is broken off." Mrs.Ranger winced and shrank.

She knew how her question and the effort of that answer must have hurt the boy; but she did not make matters worse with words.

Indeed, she would have been unable to say anything, for sympathy would have been hypocritical, and hypocrisy was with her impossible.

She thought Arthur loved Janet; she realized, too, the savage wound to his pride in losing her just at this time.

But she had never liked her, and now felt justified in that secret and, so she had often reproached herself, unreasonable dislike; and she proceeded to hate her, the first time she had ever hated anybody--to hate her as a mother can hate one who has made her child suffer.
After supper, Mrs.Ranger plunged into the household duties that were saving her from insanity.