moment the door opened, and to Mrs Mildmay's immense relief her
husband entered.

'What is the matter?' he asked quickly. 'Am I interrupting you?'

'On the contrary,' said his wife, 'I am very glad you have come. Jacinth
is, as I half feared she would be, exceedingly upset by the news about
Barmettle, and she seems to think we have not treated her with the
confidence she deserves.'

'You cannot feel that, when I tell you that my decision was only made
yesterday,' said her father to Jacinth.

'Yes. I think you might have--have consulted me a little before making
it,' the girl replied. 'It is something to me personally; to have to
live at a place like that now I am nearly grown up.'

She seemed to be purposely emphasising the selfish part of her
dissatisfaction out of a kind of reckless defiance.

'Do you quite understand that it was a choice between this appointment
and an indefinite return to India?' said Colonel Mildmay.

'I understand that you think so. But I don't see it. There was the
London thing. And even if not, I would rather have had India.'

'No, no, Jassie, don't do yourself injustice,' exclaimed her mother.
'Not when you think of the risk to your father's health.'

Jacinth hesitated.

'But there _was_ a choice,' she said; and now there was a touch of
timidity in her voice.

Colonel Mildmay considered; they were approaching the crucial point, and
he took his resolution.

'No, Jacinth,' he said. 'To my mind, as an honourable man, there was no
choice. I should have forfeited for ever my own self-respect had I
agreed to Lady Myrtle's proposal.'

And then he rapidly, but clearly, put before her the substance of their
old friend's intentions and wishes, and his reasons for refusing to fall
in with them.

'Lady Myrtle is too good a woman to sow discord in a family,' he said,
'between a child and her parents. And it was impossible for us to
approve of the apportionment of her property she proposed, knowing that
there exist at this very time those who _have_ a claim on her, who most
thoroughly deserve the restoration of what should have been theirs
always; who have suffered, indeed, already only too severely for the sin
and wrong-doing of another.'

Jacinth started, and the lines of her face hardened again.

'I thought it was that,' she exclaimed. 'Those people--they are at the
bottom of it, then.'

'Jacinth!' said her mother.

'I beg your pardon, mamma,' said the girl quickly. 'It must sound