erest to have you always.
That we shall miss you in every possible way; still duty is duty. As
long as your father did not care, and Lady Mary was rather glad to have
the Park to herself, the thing was, perhaps, different, at any rate
Freda was not then the Freda she is now.

'Serena, you are a bitter-sweet, and a horrible little apple that is.'

'But they say it makes good cider.'

'At any rate you ought not to influence me. I will not decide whilst you
are here, and that is all I will promise. If I do, it will be to go to
you undoubtedly. But I will think it over.'

That very night before she went to bed, Freda did think it over, sitting
by the fire in her delightful, warm, well-lighted, well-furnished
bedroom; but she could not come to any determination. She made out a
sort of debtor and creditor account in her own head, and cashed it
according to her somewhat imperfect notions of book-keeping.

'My father--of course I owe him a great deal in the way of duty and
love; but he owes me something for letting me have my own way all my
life, bringing me up with the notion that I should be an heiress, and
then disappointing me by marrying a woman whom I utterly despise. Lady
Mary--I owe her nothing whatever, beyond the common proper treatment
that one must give to every one; she, on the contrary, owes me
compensation for marrying my father when I am sure he didn't want her,
and certainly I did not.

'Colonel Vaughan--I don't owe him anything beyond a little improvement
in my style of singing and drawing; yes, I owe him a heavy debt of
gratitude for not proposing for me instead of Wilhelmina, for assuredly
I should have married him, and he owes me something for making a fool of
me. Wilhelmina--I owe her a good deal, firstly, for despising her,
laughing at her, ridiculing her--and she all the time better than I was,
for she never retaliated--and secondly, for trying to prejudice the
colonel against her. Harold--I owe him the love of a sister, and he owes
me nothing as yet; here I am decidedly debtor. The poor, of course,
wherever one is, one owes them a great debt of Christian charity and
love; and I must confess that they are not quite so well seen to as when
Gladys was my almoner; but then she is here again to see to them, and
that, on her own responsibility, and it is Lady Mary's place to care for
them now.

'On the other hand, Serena--I owe her everything; all my few good
thoughts, words and works. She owes me not