"What did she mean?" I asked of Cissie Boscobel, to whom I heard that Mrs. Billing had given her own account of the incident. Lady Cecilia was embarrassed. "Oh, nothing! She's just so very odd." But I insisted: "She must have meant something. Had it anything to do with Hugh?" Reluctantly Lady Cissie let it out. Mrs. Billing had got the idea that I was marrying Hugh for his money; and, though in the past she had not disapproved of this line of action, she had come to think it no road to happiness. Having taken the trouble to give me more than one hint that I should many the man I was in love with she was now disappointed in my character. "You know how much truth there is in all that, don't you?" I said, evasively. Lady Cissie did her best to support me, though between her words and her inflection there was a curious lack of correspondence. "Oh yes--certainly!" I got the reaction of her thought, however, some minutes later, when she said, apropos of nothing in our conversation: "Since Janet can't be married this month, I needn't go home for a long time." But knowing that this suggestion was in the air, I was the better able to interpret Mildred's oracular utterance the next time I sat at the foot of the couch, in the darkened room. "One can't be true to another," she said, in reply to some feeler of my own, "unless one is true to oneself, and one can't be true to oneself unless one follows the highest of one's instincts." I said, inwardly: "Ah! Now I know the reason for her distrust of me." Aloud I made it: "But that throws us back on the question as to what one's highest instincts are." There was the pause that preceded all her expressions of opinion. "On the principle that it is more blessed to give than to receive, I suppose our highest promptings are those which urge us to give most of ourselves." "And when one gives all of oneself that one can dispose of?" "One has then to consider the importance or the unimportance of what one has to withhold." Of all the things that had been said to me this was the most disturbing. It had seemed to me hitherto that the essence of my duty lay in marrying Hugh. If I married him, I argued, I should have done my best to make up to him for all he had undergone for my sake. I saw myself as owing him a debt. The refusal to pay it would have implied a kind of moral bankruptcy. Considering myself solvent, and also considering myself honest, I felt I had no choice. Since I could pay, I must pay. The reasoning was the more forcible because I liked Hugh and was grateful to him. I could be tolerably happy with him, and would make him a good wife.