The case for Winnington seemed indeed for the moment desperate. After his scene with Delia, he had left the Abbey immediately, and Lady Tonbridge, though certain that something important--and disastrous--had happened, would have known nothing, but for a sudden confession from Delia, as the two ladies sat together in the drawing-room after dinner. Delia had abruptly laid down her book, with which she was clearly only trifling--in order to say-- "I think I had better tell you at once that my guardian asked me to marry him, this afternoon, and I refused." Since this earthquake shock, Madeleine Tonbridge could imagine nothing more unsatisfactory than the conversations between them which had begun in the drawing-room, and lingered on till, now, at nearly midnight, sheer weariness on both sides had brought them to an end. When Madeleine had at last thrown up argument as hopeless, Delia with a face of carven wax, and so handsome through it all that Lady Tonbridge could have beaten her for sheer vexation, had said a quiet goodnight and departed. But she was _in love with him_, the foolish, obstinate child!--wildly, absorbingly in love with him! The fact was tragically evident, in everything she said, and everything she left unsaid. The struggle lay then between her loyalty to her friend, the passionate loyalty of woman to woman, so newly and strangely developed by the Suffrage movement, and Winnington's advancing influence,--the influence of a man equipped surely with all the means of victory--character, strength, charm--over the girl's heart and imagination. He must conquer! And yet Madeleine Tonbridge, staring into the ashes of a dwindling fire, had never persuaded herself--incorrigible optimist that she was--to so little purpose. What _was_ there at the back of the girl's mind? Something more than appeared; though what appeared was bad enough. One seemed at times to catch a glimpse of some cloaked and brooding Horror, in the dim background of the girl's consciousness, and overshadowing it. What more likely indeed, with this wild campaign sweeping through the country? She probably knew or suspected things that her moral sense condemned, to which she was nevertheless committed. "We shall end by proving all that the enemy says of us; we shall give our chance away for a generation!" "Do for Heaven's sake keep the young lady at home!" The speaker was Dr. France. After seeing his patient, dismissing the specialist, and spending half an hour _tete-a-tete_ with Delia, he came down to see Lady Tonbridge in a state that in any one else would have been a state of agitation. In him all that appeared was a certain hawkish glitter in the eye, and a tendency to pull and pinch a scarcely existing moustache. But Madeleine, who knew him well, understood that he was just as much at feud with the radical absurdity of things as she was. "No one can keep her at home. Delia is of age," she said, rising to meet him, with a face as serious as his own.