"And he loves you," I said. "Need we say any more at present? I find it hard to spare him, but sooner or later this is a thing that comes to every mother. If I surrender him to you, will you in your turn take my place and devote yourself to him as I have tried to do? There is so little time and so many things to do that I cannot talk to you as I should like. Very soon you will be married, very soon you will both have slipped away to a very far country. Nothing that any of us can do for you both will be left undone; every penny that we can scrape together will be yours. As time goes on, you will learn how much money can do--and how little. All my life I have been scraping and pinching, pinching and scraping to provide for the happiness and comfort of my husband and son. You will have to do the same. Very few of us have enough for all we should like, and you will find that between husband and wife, when one has to yield, it is the wife who yields. That is the law of the Medes and Persians. Too often it is 'A suit for him _or_ a frock for me'... Promise me that you will never let my boy go short of anything. He has been brought up to a certain standard of comfort, and I know by experience that, if you try to reduce that, it will be you who will suffer in the long run. That is part of the price that we pay for being women. And now," I said, "let me kiss my daughter." I do not wonder that my boy fell in love with her. _You_ will, too, the moment you see her. As Arthur did... There is nothing much more to tell you about our dinner with Sir Appleton; when he _did_ allow us to begin, I will say that he tried to make amends for any exhibition of what I had better call the business manner. Of course, when I reached home, I found that I had only got rid of one trouble to make way for another. Arthur... He would have been even more furious if he had been less bewildered, but, as it is, I try to forget and I shall certainly not remind him of certain things that he said about my going to work behind his back, taking decisions over his head. When one has grown _attached_ to a house... Is it not my frame and setting? Is not every corner filled, for me, with memories of the old days when the princess almost lived with us? There was an entirely _meaningless_ explosion at the expense of poor Will, who very properly refused to be drawn into argument and went straight to bed. "My dear Arthur," I said, "sooner or later this was inevitable. When our boy married, we knew that we should have to go on providing for him. Is it so great a sacrifice that we should move into a smaller house, that you, perhaps, should have to work longer than you had intended? It is to establish our son in life."