ot slept. She had lain in her
bed, wide-eyed; a series of pictures passing before her eyes with the
unnatural vividness of hallucinations. These pictures were not only of
Arnold, of Arnold again, of Arnold and Judith. There were all sorts of
odd bits of memories--a conversation overheard years before, between
her father and Lawrence, when Lawrence was a little, little boy. He
had asked--it was like Lawrence's eerie ways--apropos of nothing at
all, "What sort of a man was Aunt Victoria's husband?"

His father had said, "A rich man, very rich." This prompt appearance
of readiness to answer had silenced the child for a moment: and then
(Sylvia could see his thin little hands patting down the sand-cake he
was making) he had persisted, "What kind of a rich man?" His father
had said, "Well, he was bald--quite bald--Lawrence, come run a race
with me to the woodshed." Sylvia now, ten years later, wondered why
her father had evaded. What kind of a man _had_ Arnold's father been?

But chiefly she braced herself for the struggle with Aunt Victoria in
the morning. It came to her in fleeting glimpses that Aunt Victoria
would be only human if she resented with some heat this entire
disregard of her wishes; that the discussion might very well end in
a quarrel, and that a quarrel would mean the end of Lydford with all
that Lydford meant now and potentially. But this perception was
swept out of sight, like everything else, in the singleness of her
conviction: "Judith must know! Judith must know!"

There was, however, no struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning.
Mrs. Marshall-Smith, encountering the same passionate outcry,
recognized an irresistible force when she encountered it; recognized
it, in fact, soon enough to avoid the long-drawn-out acrimony of
discussion into which a less intelligent woman would inevitably have
plunged; recognized it almost, but not quite, in time to shut off from
Sylvia's later meditations certain startling vistas down which she
had now only fleeting glimpses. "Very well, my dear," said Mrs.
Marshall-Smith, her cherished clarity always unclouded by small
resentments,--"very well, we will trust in your judgment rather than
my own. I don't pretend to understand present-day girls, though I
manage to be very fond of one of them. Judith is your sister. You will
do, of course, what you think is right. It means, of course, Judith
being what she is, that she will instantly cast him off; and Arnold
being what he