Of what use would it be to make her mother more unhappy than she was--of what avail to tell her that the dark and terrible shadow of her father's crime had fallen over her young life, blighting it also?
Of all her mother's troubles she knew this would be the greatest so she generously refrained from naming it.

There was no need to tell her patient, long-suffering, unhappy mother that which must prove like a dagger in her gentle heart.

So Margaret Dornham had one gleam of sunshine in her wretched life.

She believed that the girl she had loved so dearly was unutterably happy.

She had read the descriptions of Lord Arleigh with tears in her eyes.
"That is how girls write of the men they love," she said--"my Madaline loves him." Madaline had written to her when the ceremony was over.