Lady Selina gasped as she sat rigid in her chair, but of the three she was the first to recover self-possession. Cicely, absolutely unprepared, remained tremblingly silent. Grimshaw was too moved to say more. After an interminable pause, he heard the autocrat’s soft, derisive voice:

“My son, Brian, warned me against that possibility, and I laughed at him—I laughed at him.”

Grimshaw spoke less calmly.

“I am not ashamed of loving her, but I am ashamed of trying to win a wife by playing the humbug and hypocrite.”

Lady Selina tried in vain to assimilate this. He loved Cicely; did she love him? The girl was now, apparently, in one of her absurd trances, looking exactly like her father. The mother was familiar with these curious seizures, but Grimshaw knew nothing of them. Cicely seemed to be turned into stone. She looked cold as marble. Beneath this impassive surface a battle was raging, as before, between the two Cicelys. The body remained aloof and inert. To the old Cicely Grimshaw’s declaration seemed brutally inopportune. Without consulting her, he had sunk all the little boats, a tiny fleet, which carried her plans and hopes. She felt that she was swamped with them, foundering helplessly in mid-channel with the farther shore almost within sight. With so much at stake, why had he acted so precipitately? At such moment, odd phrases obsess the mind. She kept on repeating to herself a French sentence learnt at school, an exercise in articulation:

“Je me prÉcipite,

“Tu te prÉcipites,

“Il se prÉcipite.”

Grimshaw was confounded, as he stared at her, and instantly he, too, became the prey of mental civil war. Doubt assailed him. He was racked by the tormenting thought that his judgment had been cruelly at fault. Conscious that he had risen to opportunity, that he had soared high above mean and material considerations, he seemed to be looking down upon his beloved grovelling in the dust of the ages—dust of that dust—disintegrating before his eyes——! Impetuously he spoke:

“I can, of course, leave Upworthy.”

Lady Selina hesitated, but not for long. She observed coldly:

“Under the circumstances, Mr. Grimshaw, that is the wise thing to do.”

The hypercritical may affirm that it was not, under the circumstances, the wise thing for a mother to say, inasmuch as it forced into action an apparently apathetic and dazed creature. For the moment, Cicely remained as before. Then, with a sharp exclamation, she stood up—revitalised, quickened incredibly. She seemed to Grimshaw to expand from a girl into a woman, a complete individuality, self-reliant, capable, almost dominating; the new Cicely, the daughter of strenuous times, born of them, exulting in them, as fresh as Aphrodite when she rose from the waves.

“I shall go with him.”

Swiftly she crossed to his side, lifting a radiant face to his. Then she addressed her mother, speaking very softly, but clearly, with enchanting tenderness.

“I love him as devotedly as he loves me.”

Lady Selina shivered, as if seized by a rigor. In a pathological sense this had indeed happened. A rigor of the mind caused a sort of collapse. She lay back in her chair, closing her eyes. Cicely hastened to her.

“Mother, this is a dreadful surprise to you. But you love me, don’t you? You won’t be unkind?”

A dreary voice, hardly recognisable, answered her:

“In a few hours I have lost my house, my people, and my daughter.”