Miss Mildmay was softened too, but she was not yet disposed to give in. She had not been able to eat that special muffin which Stella had re-toasted for her. Lady Jane, in declining tea curtly with a wave of her hands, had made the tea-drinkers uncomfortable, and especially had arrested the eating of muffins, which it is difficult to consume with dignity unless you have the sympathy of your audience. It was cold now, quite cold and unappetizing. It lay in its little plate with the air of a thing rejected. And Miss Mildmay felt it was not consistent with her position to ask even for half a cup of hot tea. “It has to be seen,” she said stiffly, “what friends will respond to the appeal; everybody is not at the disposal of the erring person when and how she pleases. I must draw a line----” “What do you say I have done, then?” cried Stella, flushing with lively wrath. “Do you think I went out in that boat on purpose to be drowned or catch my death? Do you think I wanted to be ill and sea-sick and make an exhibition of myself before two men? Do you think I wanted them to see me _ill_? Goodness!” cried Stella, overcome at once by the recollection and the image, “could you like a man--especially if he was by way of admiring you, and talking nonsense to you and all that--to see you _ill_ at sea? If you can believe that you can believe anything, and there is no more for me to say.” The force of this argument was such that Miss Mildmay was quite startled out of her usual composure and reserve. She stared at Stella for a moment with wide-opened eyes. “I did not think of that,” she said in a tone of sudden conviction. “There is truth in what you say--certainly there is truth in what you say.” “Truth in it!” cried the girl. “If you had only seen me--but I am very thankful you didn’t see me--leaning over the side of that dreadful boat, not minding what waves went over me! When you were a girl and had men after you, oh, Miss Mildmay, I ask you, would you have chosen to have them to see you _then_?” Miss Mildmay put the plate with the cold muffin off her knees. She set down her empty cup. She felt the solemnity of the appeal. “No,” she said, “if you put it to me like that, Stella, I am obliged to allow I should not. And I may add,” she went on, looking round the room as if to a contradictory audience, “I don’t know any woman who would; and that is my opinion, whatever anybody may say.” She paused a moment with a little triumphant air of having conducted to a climax a potent argument, looking round upon the baffled opponents. And then she came down from that height and added in soft tones of affectionate reproach: “But why did you go out with them at all, Stella? When I was a girl, as you say, and had--I never, never should have exposed myself to such risks, by going out in a boat with----”