te."

"You love me, too, you say."

"I feel an obligation to her."

"And, good Heavens! do you feel none to me?"

"No, no. I love you too much to feel an obligation to you."

"But you love your mother _and_ feel an obligation to her. Why, Mathilde,
that feeling of obligation _is_ love--love in its most serious form.
That's what you don't feel for me. That's why you won't go."

"I haven't said I wouldn't go."

"You never even thought of going."

"I have, I do. But how can I help hesitating? You must know I want to
go."

"I see very little sign of it," he murmured. The interview had not gone
as he intended. He had not meant, he never imagined, that he would
attempt to urge and coerce her; but her very detachment seemed to set a
fire burning within him.

"I think," he said with an effort to sound friendly, "that I had better
go and let you think this over by yourself."

He was actually moving to the door when she sprang up and put her arms
about him.

"Weren't you even going to kiss me, Pete?"

He stooped, and touched her cheek with his lips.

"Do you call that a kiss?"

"O Mathilde, do you think any kiss will change the facts?" he answered,
and was gone.

As soon as he had left her the desire for tears left her, too. She felt
calm and more herself, more an isolated, independent human being than
ever before in her life. She thought of all the things she ought to have
said to Pete. The reason why she felt no obligation to him was that she
was one with him. She was prepared to sacrifice him exactly as she was,
or ought to be, willing to sacrifice herself; whereas her mother--it
seemed as if her mother's power surrounded her in every direction, as
solid as the ancients believed the dome of heaven.

Pringle appeared in the doorway in his eternal hunt for the tea-things.

"May I take the tray, miss?" he said.

She nodded, hardly glancing at the untouched tea-table. Pringle, as he
bent over it, observed that it was nice to have Mr. Farron back.
Mathilde remembered that she, too, had once been interested in her
stepfather's return.

"Where's my mother, Pringle?"

"Mrs. Farron's in her room, I think, miss, and Mr. Lanley's with her."

Lanley had stopped as usual to ask after his son-in-law. He found his
daughter writing letters in her room. He thought her looking cross, but
in deference to her recent anxieties he called it, even in his own mind,
overstrained.

"Vincent is doing very well, I believe,"