"I'm dreadfully sorry for you! I do wish I could help you. But you know what Lord and Lady William think, what Mr. Newbury thinks about divorced people marrying again. You know--how they've set a standard all their lives--for their people here. How can they go against all they've ever preached? You must see their point of view, too. You must think of their feelings. They hate--I'm sure they hate--making any one unhappy. But if one of the chief people on the estate does this, and they think it wicked, how--" "Ah!" cried Mrs. Betts, eagerly interrupting. "But now please, _please_, Miss Coryston, listen! This is what I want, what I beg you to say to Mr. Newbury! I can't give John up--and he'll never give me up. But I'll go away--I'll go to a little cottage John has--it was his mother's, in Charnwood Forest--far away from everybody. Nobody here will ever know! And John will come to see me, whenever he can, whenever his work will let him. He will come over in the motor--he's always running about the country--nobody would ever notice. It might be said we'd separated--so we should have separated--as far as spending our lives together goes. But I should sometimes--sometimes--have my John!--for my own--my very own--and he would sometimes have me!" Sobs came tearing through, and, bowing her face upon the sofa, Mrs. Betts shook from head to foot. Marcia sat silent, but strangely conscious of new horizons of feeling--of a deepening life. This was the first time she had ever come across such an experience, touched so nearly on passions and sins which had hitherto been to her as stage phantoms moving in a far distance. The girl of to-day, whatever class she belongs to, is no longer, indeed, reared in the conventional innocence of the mid-Victorian moment--a moment differing wholly from that immediately before it, no less than from those which have come after it. The manners, the plays, the talk of our generation attack such an innocence at every turn. But in place of an indirect and hearsay knowledge, here, in this humble, shabby instance, was, for the first time, the real stuff--the real, miserable thing, in flesh and blood. That was new to her. And, in a flash of memory and association, there passed through her mind the vision of the Opera House blazing with lights--Iphigenia on the stage, wailing at her father's knees in an agony of terror and despair, and Newbury's voice: "_This_ is the death she shrinks from--" And again, as the beautiful form, erect and calm once more, swept stately to its doom: "And this--is the death she _accepts_!"