"My belief is that when two people marry who are in love as they ought to be, and who in addition are good--By good I think I mean people--" Leslie, with her look of wisdom beyond her years, paused to take a survey of life, "--people who have a sense of the other person's rights, and, as a matter of heart, not principle, feel the other's claims just a little more strongly than their own--in the case of such people, when the passion they marry on dies out with their growing older, as we generally see it do, something takes its place that deserves the name of love every bit as much." "Aurora is good," said Estelle, from her soul. "You would never know how good unless you had stood in need of kindness." "Gerald is good, too," said Leslie, with an effect of more impartiality but no less positiveness. "He would disdain to be anything else." "What is wrong with me is that I'm selfish, I guess," said Estelle, looking contrite, "and don't like having to give her up to him, after all the beautiful things we'd planned together. What I ought to feel is nothing but thankfulness for her having such a chance of happiness, and then thankfulness for all she did, trying to make up for her desertion." Without transition, Estelle went back to the story of the past night. "You can imagine there wasn't any more sleep for that spell. I got up, and we went to her room, where she had all the lights lighted and was in the middle of packing her trunk. She only took one, and about a quarter of her things. Gerald's going to design wonderful costumes for her, the style he prefers. I could see she's ready to do just anything to please him. I'd already noticed how she'd altered her way of doing her hair, but wasn't smart enough to recognize the signs!... While she was at work packing she planned for my summer,--that I'm to invite Mademoiselle Durand to go traveling with me, so I can improve my French at the same time as give that poor hard-working creature a real vacation and treat. Then when they go to Venice, she wants me to join them, and the three of us have a regular jamboree. Then next winter, after I've got home, she wants me to go to Colorado to visit the Grand Cañon and see the great sights of my native country before settling down again in East Boston. She made me a present of Ami." "Ami?" "I've changed his name from Busteretto. Don't you like it better? Little Tweetums! He's the only darling I've got left!" She pressed a kiss on the warm top of his head. "She made me a present of all the clothes and things she wasn't taking with her. She made me a present of everything in this house that we didn't find in it when we took it--turned it all over to me to do what I please with. And I'm sure I don't know what I shall do with it all unless I set up a store. Anything you see and think you'd like to have, please say so." "She gave you all these things? Do you mean it?" asked Leslie, surprised despite what she had already known of Aurora.