Lady Marabout sighed, coughed, played nervously with the tassels of her peignoir, crumpled Bijou's ears with a reckless disregard to that priceless pet's feelings, and wished herself at the bottom of the Serpentine. Cardonnel had trusted her, she couldn't desert _him_; poor dear Adeliza had trusted her, she couldn't betray _her_; what was right to one would be wrong to the other, and to reconcile her divided duties was a Danaid's labor. For months she had worried her life out lest her advice should be asked, and now the climax was come, and asked it was. "What a horrible position!" thought Lady Marabout. She waited and hesitated till the pendule had ticked off sixty seconds, then she summoned her courage and spoke: "My dear, advice in such matters is often very harmful, and always very useless; plenty of people have asked my counsel, but I never knew any of them take it unless it chanced to chime in with their fancy. A woman's best adviser is her own heart, specially on such a subject as this. But before I give my opinion, may I ask if you have accepted him?" Lady Marabout's heart throbbed quick and fast as she put the momentous question, with an agitation for which she would have blushed before her admirably nonchalante niece; but the tug of war was coming, and if Goodwood should be lost! "You have accepted him?" she asked again. "No! I--refused him." The delicate rose went out of the Hon. Val's cheeks for once, and she breathed quickly and shortly. Goodwood was _not_ lost then! Was she sorry--was she glad? Lady Marabout hardly knew; like Wellington, she felt the next saddest thing after a defeat is a victory. "But you love him, Valencia?" she asked, half ashamed of suggesting such weakness, to this glorious beauty. The Hon. Val unclasped her necklet as if it were a chain, choking her, and her face grew white and set: the coldest will feel on occasion, and all have _some_ tender place that can wince at the touch. "Perhaps; but such folly is best put aside at once. Certainly I prefer him to others, but to accept him would have been madness, absurdity. I told him so!" "You told him so! If you had the heart to do so, Valencia, he has not lost much in losing you!" burst in Lady Marabout, her indignation getting the better of her judgment, and her heart, as usual, giving the coup de grace to her reason. "I am shocked at you! Every tender-hearted woman feels regret for affection she is obliged to repulse, even when she does not return it; and you, who love this man----" "Would you have had me accept him, aunt?" "Yes," cried Lady Marabout, firmly, forgetting every vestige of "duty," and every possibility of dear Adeliza's vengeance, "if you love him, I would, decidedly. When I married my dear Philip's father, he was what Cardonnel is, a cavalry man, as far off his family title then as Cardonnel is off his now."