So it had been with her, and she thought that it should have been so with Mollie, until the tiresome figure of the Vicar, spoiling the delicate poise with his crude accusations, presented itself to her. It was that that had made Mollie so careful that she had shut herself off in irresponsiveness, wary and intended, instead of following the fresh pure impulses of her girlhood. She was sure of it, and half wished she had said as much to Bertie, but on consideration was glad that she hadn't. He would have been very angry, and awkwardness might have come of it, for those who were forced to live in proximity to this official upholder of righteousness. He would be sufficiently confounded when what he had shown himself so eager to spoil in the making should result in happiness and accord. If Beatrix, in her loyalty towards youth as against interfering middle-age, also looked forward with pleasure to exhibitions of annoyance at the defeat that was coming to him, she may perhaps be forgiven. It may be supposed, however, that during that long slow ride home her thoughts were more taken up with her own affair than with that of her friends, which indeed seemed in train to be happily settled in a way that hers was not. For the first time in all these months, she examined it from a standpoint a little outside herself. She did not know that she was enabled to do this by the fact that her devotion to Lassigny's memory had begun to loosen its hold on her. Her time of love-making had been so short, and her knowledge of her lover so slight, that it was now the memory to which she clung, and was obliged to cling if her love was not to die down altogether. None of this, however, would she have admitted. She had given her love, and in her own view of it she had given it for life. What she found herself able to examine, in the light of Bertie Pemberton's revelation of himself, was the figure of her own lover, not altogether deprived of the halo with which she had crowned it, but for the first time somewhat as others might see it, and especially her father.