ituation where
they wouldn't have dreamed of putting themselves--and yet they rise to
it and conquer it," philosophized Aunt Victoria. "Life takes hold of
us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought. Judith will
_mean_ to do the right thing. If she were married, she'd _have_ to do
it! It seems to me a great responsibility you take, Sylvia--you may,
with the best of intentions in the world, be ruining the happiness of
two lives."

Sylvia got up, her eyes red with unshed tears. It was not the first
time that morning. "It's all too horrible," she murmured. "But I
haven't any right to conceal it from Judith."

Her eyes were still red when, an hour later, she stepped into the room
again and said, "I've mailed it."

Her aunt, still in lavender silk negligee, so far progressed towards
the day's toilet as to have her hair carefully dressed, looked up
from the _Revue Bleue_, and nodded. Her expression was one of quiet
self-possession.

Sylvia came closer to her and sat down on a straight-backed chair. She
was dressed for the street, and hatted, as though she herself had
gone out to mail the letter. "And now, Tantine," she said, with the
resolute air of one broaching a difficult subject, "I think I ought to
be planning to go home very soon." It was a momentous speech, and a
momentous pause followed it. It had occurred to Sylvia, still shaken
with the struggle over the question of secrecy, that she could,
in decency, only offer to take herself away, after so violently
antagonizing her hostess. She realized with what crude intolerance she
had attacked the other woman's position, how absolutely with claw and
talon she had demolished it. She smarted with the sense that she
had seemed oblivious of an "obligation." She detested the sense of
obligation. And having become aware of a debt due her dignity, she had
paid it hastily, on the impulse of the moment. But as the words still
echoed in the air, she was struck to see how absolutely her immediate
future, all her future, perhaps, depended on the outcome of that
conversation she herself had begun. She looked fixedly at her aunt,
trying to prepare herself for anything. But she was not prepared for
what Mrs. Marshall-Smith did.

She swept the magazine from her lap to the floor and held out her arms
to Sylvia. "I had hoped--I had hoped you were happy--with me," she
said, and in her voice was that change of quality, that tremor of
sincerity which Sylvia had always found