it were, through another
person's eyes.

And Marion herself, holding the girl tightly in all affection, and
stroking the dark head with a tender touch, felt a sudden helplessness.
This was not the Philippa she had expected to see. She had read her
letter with the utmost surprise, not to say consternation, and,
womanlike, had read into the simple communication a very great deal
that had not been in it at all.

That Philippa should feel affection for the man whom she had come to
know under such extraordinary circumstances she could well believe; it
was entirely in keeping with her estimate of the girl's character, and
she had, in fact, said as much to her husband from the first.
"Philippa will love any one who wants her badly enough," she had said.
"It is simply her loving heart and her pity that lead her into it."
But that she should think of marriage was almost unbelievable; it could
not be allowed.

She had imagined Philippa composed, even happy--indeed the girl had
said as much when she wrote--uplifted by a sense of heroism which was
possibly quite unconscious--ready to take a course to which her
sympathy and her compassion impelled her, without any thought of what
the consequences might be, so far as she herself was concerned.

As she, Marion, well knew, the bodily weakness of a man can be in
itself a great attraction to a certain type of woman, and no doubt Phil
had been carried off her feet by his very need of her--blinded by her
emotions so that she could not see that they were misleading her, to
say the least of it. And instead of this, she found a Philippa
radiant, palpitating, blissful, with eyes that shone with gladness
through a veil of dreams.

It was so utterly unexpected that it cut the ground of all her
carefully prepared arguments away from underneath her feet. She drew
Philippa to a couch and they sat down side by side.

There was silence for a while, and then the girl began recounting in a
low voice the steps which one by one had led her to the present moment.
She did not find it easy. It was hard to forget that under Marion's
kind and grave attention there must be, for all her love, the little
barrier raised by the dissentient voice of her conscience. It had been
much easier to be quite frank with Isabella, whose love for Francis
swept aside every scruple, every obstacle, but with Marion it was
different. It was not that she could not understand the power of love,
or was incapable of sa