"You, my dear . . . Mr. Hargreave! He must be nearly sixty!" The word "sixty" chilled Mary. "Fifty-one," she murmured. "An old man like that . . . Really he ought to be ashamed of himself. He ought to be preparing himself for his eternal life instead of thinking of a wife. . . . And with all those children too." Mary's sense of justice was offended. "A great many widowers marry again for the sake of their children, don't they?" "But Mr. Hargreave has two grown-up daughters." Again there was a chilly catch at Mary's heart, and she had a lump in her throat. She said: "No one else has ever asked me to marry." It needed melodrama to move Mrs. Folyat; tragedy or tragi-comedy left her blank. She was in no mood for general consideration, for she was thinking with cold practicability of the need of the moment. When she thought of the house without Mary it was as a place of absolute silence. There were many evenings when Francis said never a word; many again when he sat alone in his study or working in his greenhouse, and only came up just before it was time to go to bed. Mrs. Folyat had a horror of silence. . . . Mary must not go, she thought, Mary must not go. She came swiftly to the point and asked: "Have you accepted him?" Unreasonably, in the face of experience, Mary had been expecting sympathy; she so craved it. For a flickering moment she desired almost viciously to lie, but she was hurt into truth. "No," she said. Mrs. Folyat sighed with relief and triumph. "Of course you couldn't," she said. "He is such a common man. . . . Let us play Bézique." Mary fetched the cards and they played until Francis came up at ten o'clock. She let him take her hand and went downstairs to the kitchen to brew her mother's chocolate. She had lost all interest in Mr. Hargreave, and she felt nothing at all. In her bedroom that night she found it quite easy to write to him. She said that she trusted him to understand that she could not marry him, and that it would be best in the circumstances if he found another teacher for Violet. He had (she continued) always been very kind to her. She was very grateful to him, and would think well of him, but her duty lay towards her father and mother. So, without any ill-feeling she slipped into the part designed for her by her mother. As she was writing to Mr. Hargreave, her mother said to Francis: "My dear, what do you think? That horrid old Hargreave has actually proposed to Mary. Of course she refused him." "Poor Mary," said Francis. XXIX DISCUSSION _Will kein Gott auf Erde sein? Sind wir selber Götter._ W. MÜLLER.