‘_Your_ advice! Ah, you will be fine guides to each other, if this is how you treat your best friends,’ said Miss Cherry. But she yielded a little to the girl’s caressing, and dried her eyes. ‘I am going away with a heavy heart,’ she added, after this partial making-up, shaking her head sorrowfully. ‘I don’t know what it is all coming to. _He_ is never at home--always _there_:--and you----. In my time we thought of what was right, not only what we liked best; but they tell us in all the books that the world is getting wiser, and knows better every day. I only hope you will find it so. Oh, Cara,’ said Miss Cherry, ‘it is thought a mean thing to say that honesty is the best policy, though it was the fashion once; but it is. I don’t mean to say that is the highest way of looking at it; but still it is so. For one vexation you may have by speaking the truth, you will find a dozen from not speaking it. I wish you would think of this. But I will not say any more.’ ‘I am not a liar,’ said Cara, with a wild indignation in her heart which was beyond words; and she refused to speak again, and saw her aunt off with a throbbing heart, but neither tears nor words beyond what was absolutely needful; never had she parted with anyone in this way before. She came in and shut herself up in her room, directing them to say that she was ill, and could not drive when Mrs. Meredith came for her. Honesty the best policy! What breaking up of heaven and earth was it that placed her amid all these shadows and falsities, she whose spirit revolted from everything that was even doubtful? She lay down upon her little bed, and cried herself, not to sleep, but into the quiet of exhaustion. Aunt Cherry, who had been like her mother to her, had gone away wounded and estranged. Edward--what a countenance his had been as he turned and went out of the room! And Oswald, who had dragged her into this false position and would not clear her, laughed! Cara hid her eyes from the light in one of those outbursts of youthful despair, which are more intolerable than heavier sorrows. Such pangs have before now driven young souls to desperation. She was hemmed in, and did not know what to do. And where in all the world was she to find a friend now?