ust what Mr. Wace's attitude had been
towards you--and that it is still unchanged."

Damaris got up. Pulled off her driving coat, gloves and hat. Threw them
upon the seat of a chair. The act was symbolic. She felt suffocated,
impelled to rid herself of every impediment. For wasn't she confronted
with another battle--a worse one than that with the house, namely, a
battle with her long-ago baby-love, and her father's love
too--Henrietta.--Henrietta, so strangely powerful, so amazingly
persistent--Henrietta who enclosed you in arms, apparently so soft but
furnished with suckers, octopus arms adhering, never letting you go? She
had played with the idea of this intrusion of Henrietta's and its effect
upon Miss Felicia, at first as something amusing. It ceased to be
amusing. It frightened her.

"And my attitude is unchanged, too," she said presently, gravely proud.
"I didn't want to marry Marshall Wace then. I was dreadfully sorry when
Henrietta told me he cared for me. I don't want to marry him or have
him care for me one bit more now. I think it very interfering of
Henrietta to trouble you with this. It is not the moment. She might at
least have waited."

"So I felt," Miss Felicia put in. She watched her niece anxiously, as the
latter went across to the fire-place and stood, her back to the room,
looking down into the glowing logs.

For she had--or rather ought she not to have?--another communication to
make which involved the fighting of a battle on her own account, not
against Henrietta Frayling, still less against Damaris, but against
herself. It trembled on the tip of her tongue. She felt impelled, yet
sorrowed to utter it. Hence her wishes and purposes jostled one another,
being tenderly, bravely, heroically even, contradictory. In speaking she
invited the shattering of a dream of personal election to happiness--a
late blossoming happiness and hence the more entrancing, the more
pathetic. That any hope of the dream's fulfilment was fragile as glass,
lighter than gossamer, the veriest shadow of a shade, her natural
diffidence and sane sense, alike, convinced her. For this very cause, the
dream being of the sweetest and most intimate, how gladly would she have
cherished the enchanting foolishness of it a trifle longer!--Her act of
heroism would earn no applause, moreover, would pass practically
unnoticed. No one would be aware of her sacrifice. She would only gain
the satisfaction of knowing she had done the perfectl