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“You tell me Leila’s happy. If she’s happy, she doesn’t need you–need you, that is, in the same way as before. You wanted, I know, to be always in reach, always free and available if she should suddenly call you to her or take refuge with you. I understood that–I respected it. I didn’t urge my case because I saw it was useless. You couldn’t, I understood well enough, have felt free to take such happiness as life with me might give you while she was unhappy, and, as you imagined, with no hope of release. Even then I didn’t feel as you did about it; I understood better the trend of things here. But ten years ago the change hadn’t really come; and I had no way of convincing you that it was coming. Still, I always fancied that Leila might not think her case was closed, and so I chose to think that ours wasn’t either. Let me go on thinking so, at any rate, till you’ve seen her, and confirmed with your own eyes what Susy Suffern tells you.”

III

All through what Susy Suffern told and retold her during their four-hours’ flight to the hills this plea of Ide’s kept coming back to Mrs. Lidcote. She did not yet know what she felt as to its bearing on her own fate, but it was something on which her confused thoughts could stay themselves amid the welter of new impressions, and she was inexpressibly glad that he had said what he had, and said it at that particular moment. It helped her to hold fast to her identity in the rush of strange names and new categories that her cousin’s talk poured out on her.

With the progress of the journey Miss Suffern’s communications grew more and more amazing. She was like a cicerone preparing the mind of an inexperienced traveller for the marvels about to burst on it.

“You won’t know Leila. She’s had her pearls reset. Sargent’s to paint her. Oh, and I was to tell you that she hopes you won’t mind being the least bit squeezed over Sunday. The house was built by Wilbour’s father, you know, and it’s rather old-fashioned–only ten spare bedrooms. Of course that’s small for what they mean to do, and she’ll show you the new plans they’ve had made. Their idea is to keep the present house as a wing. She told me to explain–she’s so dreadfully sorry not to be able to give you a sitting-room just at first. They’re thinking of Egypt for next winter, unless, of course, Wilbour gets his appointment. Oh, didn’t she write you about that? Why, he wants Borne, you know–the second secretaryship. Or, rather, he wanted England; but Leila insisted that if they went abroad she must be near you. And of course what she says is law. Oh, they quite hope they’ll get it. You see Horace’s uncle is in the Cabinet,–one of the assistant secretaries,–and I believe he has a good deal of pull–“

“Horace’s uncle? You mean Wilbour’s, I suppose,” Mrs. Lidcote interjected, with a gasp of which a fraction was given to Miss Suffern’s flippant use of the language.

“Wilbour’s? No, I don’t. I mean Horace’s. There’s no bad feeling between them, I assure you. Since Horace’s engagement was announced–you didn’t know Horace was engaged? Why, he’s marrying one of Bishop Thorbury’s girls: the red-haired one who wrote the novel that every one’s talking about, ‘This Flesh of Mine.’ They’re to be married in the cathedral. Of course Horace can, because it was Leila who–but, as I say, there’s not the least feeling, and Horace wrote himself to his uncle about Wilbour.”

Mrs. Lidcote’s thoughts fled back to what she had said to Ide the day before on the deck of the Utopia. “I didn’t take up much room before, but now where is there a corner for me?” Where indeed in this crowded, topsy-turvey world, with its headlong changes and helter-skelter readjustments, its new tolerances and indifferences and accommodations, was there room for a character fashioned by slower sterner processes and a life broken under their inexorable pressure? And then, in a flash, she viewed the chaos from a new angle, and order seemed to move upon the void. If the old processes were changed, her case was changed with them; she, too, was a part of the general readjustment, a tiny fragment of the new pattern worked out in bolder freer harmonies. Since her daughter had no penalty to pay, was not she herself released by the same stroke? The rich arrears of youth and joy were gone; but was there not time enough left to accumulate new stores of happiness? That, of course, was what Franklin Ide had felt and had meant her to feel. He had seen at once what the change in her daughter’s situation would make in her view of her own. It was almost–wondrously enough!–as if Leila’s folly had been the means of vindicating hers.