fore she slept when she wished
Brinkley to go down and recall her telegram; but he refused to be a fool
at so much inconvenience to himself.

Mrs. Brinkley came to breakfast feeling so much more haggard than she
found either of the Pasmers looking, that she was able to throw off
her lingering remorse for having told Mavering not to come. She had the
advantage also of doubt as to her precise motive in having done so; she
had either done so because she had judged it best for him not to see
Miss Pasmer again, or else she had done so to relieve the girl from the
pain of an encounter which her mother evidently dreaded for her. If one
motive seemed at moments outrageously meddling and presumptuous, the
other was so nobly good and kind that it more than counterbalanced it in
Mrs. Brinkley's mind, who knew very well in spite of her doubt that she
had, acted from a mixture of both. With this conviction, it was both
a comfort and a pang to find by the register of the hotel, which she
furtively consulted, that Dan had not arrived by the morning boat, as
she groundlessly feared and hoped he might have done.

In any case, however, and at the end of all the ends, she had that girl
on her hands more than ever; and believing as she did that Dan and Alice
had only to meet in order to be reconciled, she felt that the girl whom
she had balked of her prey was her innocent victim. What right had she
to interfere? Was he not her natural prey? If he liked being a prey,
who was lawfully to forbid him? He was not perfect; he would know how to
take care of himself probably; in marriage things equalised themselves.
She looked at the girl's thin cheeks and lack-lustre eyes, and pitied
and hated her with that strange mixture of feeling which our victims
aspire in us.

She walked out on the verandah with the Pasmers after breakfast, and
chatted a while about indifferent things; and Alice made an effort to
ignore the event of the night before with a pathos which wrung Mrs.
Brinkley's heart, and with a gay resolution which ought to have been a
great pleasure to such a veteran dissembler as her mother. She said she
had never found the air so delicious; she really believed it would begin
to do her good now; but it was a little fresh just there, and with her
eyes she invited her mother to come with her round the corner into that
sheltered recess, and invited Mrs. Brinkley not to come.

It was that effect of resentment which is lighter even than a touc