ing strain on lovers' vows may be acknowledged by them
as an untold blessing in after-years." Here she began to feel she was
not improving matters, and continued, with misgivings:--"I am scarcely
asking you to do even that. I am only appealing to you to suggest to
your son a fact that is obvious to myself and my husband, because it is
almost impossible for us, under the circumstances, to make such an
appeal to him ourselves."

"Are you so confident of the grounds of your suspicions ... about ...
about the motives that are influencing your daughter?"

"They are not suspicions. They are certainties. At least, I am
convinced--and I am her mother--that her chief motive in accepting your
son was vitiated--yes, vitiated!--by a mistaken zeal for--suppose we
call it poetical justice. I am not going to say the girl does not fancy
herself in love." She laughed a maternal sort of laugh--the laugh that
seniority, undeceived by life's realities, laughs at the crazy dawn of
passion in infatuated children. "Of course she does. But knowing what I
do, am I not right to make an attempt at least to protect her from
herself?" She lowered her voice to an increase of earnestness, as though
she had found a way to go nearer to the heart of her subject. "Does any
woman know--_can_ any woman know--better than I do, the value of a
girl's first love?"

It was a daring recognition of their old relation, and the veil of the
thin pretence that it could be successfully ignored had fallen from
between them.

The Baronet was a Man of the World. "Women do not take these things to
heart as men do." And then, the moment after, was in a cold perspiration
to think in what a delicate position it would have landed him. Just
think!--with the Miss Abercrombie he had married cherishing her nervous
system upstairs, and the pending reappearance of a son and daughter who
were very liable to amusement with a parent whom they scarcely took
seriously--for _him_ to be hinting at the remains of an undying passion
for this lady! He could only accept her estimate of girls by
stammering:--"P-possibly! Young people--yes!"

But his embarrassment and hesitation were so visible that the Countess
had little choice between flinching or charging bravely up to the guns.

She chose the courageous course, influenced perhaps by the thought that
if the marriage came off, there would be a long perspective of
reciprocal consciousnesses in the future for herself and this man, who
h