t, little idiot?"

"About leaving him--alone."

"Are you Stephen Siward's keeper?" demanded Mrs. Ferrall, exasperated.

"I felt as though I were, for awhile. He is ill."

"With an illness that, thank God, you are not going to nurse through
life. Don't look at me that way, dear. I'm obliged to speak harshly;
I'm obliged to harden my heart to such a monstrous idea. You know I love
you; you know I care deeply for that poor boy--but do you think I could
be loyal to either of you and not say what I do say? He is doomed, as
sure as you sit there! He has fallen, and no one can help him. Link
after link he has broken with his own world; his master-vice holds him
faster, closer, more absolutely, than hell ever held a lost soul!"

"Grace, I cannot endure--"

"You must! Are you trying to drug your silly self with romance so you
won't recognise truth when you see it? Are you drifting back into old
impulses, unreasoning whims of caprice? Have you forgotten what I know
of you, and what you know of yourself? Is the taint of your transmitted
inheritance beginning to show in you--the one woman of your race who is
fashioned to withstand it and stamp it out?"

"I am mistress of my emotions," said Sylvia, flushing.

"Then suppress them," retorted Grace Ferrall hotly, "before they begin
to bully you. There was no earthly reason for you to talk to Stephen.
No disinterested impulse moved you. It was a sheer perverse, sentimental
restlessness--the delicate, meddlesome deviltry of your race. And if
that poison is in you, it's well for you to know it."

"It is in me," said Sylvia, staring at the fire.

"Then you know what to do for it."

"No, I don't."

"Well, I do," said Grace decisively; "and the sooner you marry Howard
and intrench yourself behind your pride, the better off you'll be.
That's where, fortunately enough, you differ from your ancestors; you
are unable to understand marital treachery. Otherwise you'd make it
lively for us all."

"It is true," said Sylvia deliberately, "that I could not be treacherous
to anybody. But I am wondering; I am asking myself just what constitutes
treachery to myself."

"Sentimentalising over Stephen might fill the bill," observed Grace
tartly.

"But it doesn't seem to," mused Sylvia, her blue gaze on the coals.
"That is what I do not understand. I have no conscience concerning what
I feel for him."

"What do you feel?"

"I was in love with him. You knew it."

"You liked him," insis