‘My heart almost failed me when all was over, she wrote; ‘I think I must have shown it in my looks, for our cousin, Heathcote Mountford, held out his arm to me. It was not his arm I wanted, Cosmo, you know. Oh, how strange and how sad it is that just when we want support most, hard life has so altered everything that we cannot have it!’ And then, again, after giving him the fullest details of the will: ‘I told you before that the thought of being set aside--of being second where I had always been first--was more hard to me than I could have believed possible; and you, who are always ready to think the best of me, said that it was natural, that I could not have been expected to feel otherwise. I must tell you now, however, in my own defence, that I did not feel at all like this to-day; I never imagined, though I have thought so often on the subject, that it would have been possible to set me aside so completely as has been done. You understand that I have nothing (except what came to me from old Uncle Ben), nothing--except indeed a sort of allowance like a schoolmistress for taking care of Rose, which will only last three years. But, Cosmo, if you will believe me, I never thought of it; my heart did not sink in the least. I did not seem to care that it had all gone away from me, or that Rose had been set in my place, or that my father--(poor papa--how he must have felt it at the last!) should have been so unjust. They were all made of no account, as if they were the most trifling things in the world by--something else. I owe that to you too: and you must understand, dear Cosmo, you _must_ understand that I feel you must have thought of this, and more or less done it on purpose, for my sake. I cared nothing, nothing, for all the loss and downfall, because there just gleamed upon me a possibility--no, not a possibility--a fancy, an imagination, of how different it would be if I had to face not the loss of fortune, but the loss of love, and companionship, and support. I cried out to myself, What would it all matter in comparison with that? Thank God that it is money that has been taken from me, not _that_. Feeling myself just for that moment, and for good reason, alone, made me realise to the very bottom of my heart what it would be to be really alone--to have no one to fall back upon, no Cosmo, no world of my own where I can enter in and be above all the world. So you see this little bitter has been sweet, it has been medicine for all my other weaknesses. Through this I rose altogether superior to everything that was sordid. I was astonished at myself. Making believe not to care and not caring are two different things, and this time I attained real indifference, thanks to you.’