But steadying her thoughts and enjoying her dramatic bitterness, she laughed. He had merely surprised her likeness to Aunt Rose and that was all. Her dream was over. She had known it was a dream, but the awakening was cruel; it was also intensely exciting. She did not regret it; she had at least discovered something about Aunt Rose. She had a lover. That look of his, that pleading movement of his hand, were unmistakable; he was a lover, and perhaps she, Henrietta Mallett, alone knew the truth. She had suspected a secret, now she knew it; and she had a sense of power, she had a weapon. She imagined herself standing over Aunt Rose, armed with knowledge, no longer afraid; she was involved in a romantic, perhaps a shameful, situation. Aunt Rose was meeting a lover clandestinely in the woods while Aunt Caroline and Aunt Sophia sat innocently at home, marvelling at Rose’s indifference to men, yet rejoicing in her spinsterhood; and Henrietta felt that Rose had wronged her stepsisters almost as much as she had wronged her niece. She was deceitful; that, in plain terms, accounted for what had seemed a mysterious and conquered sorrow. It was Henrietta who was to suffer, through the shattering of a dream. She went home, walking quickly, but feeling that she groped in a fog, broken here and there by lurid lights, the lights of knowledge and determination. She was younger than Aunt Rose, she was as pretty, and she was the daughter of Reginald Mallett who, though she did not know it, had always wanted the things desired by other people. She could continue to love her stranger and at the back of her mind was the unacknowledged conviction that Aunt Rose’s choice must be well worth loving. And again how strangely events seemed to serve her: first the dropping of an orchid and now the leaping of a squirrel! She felt herself in the hands of higher powers. She had a feverish longing to see Rose again, to see her plainly for the first time and dressing for dinner was like preparing for a great event. Yet when dinner-time came everything was surprisingly the same. The deceived Caroline and Sophia ate with the usual appetite, Susan hovered with the same quiet attention, and Rose showed no sign of a recent interview with a lover. Across the candlelight she looked at Henrietta kindly and Henrietta remembered the three thousand pounds. She did not want to remember them. They constituted an obligation towards this woman who did not sufficiently appreciate her, who met that man secretly, in a wood, who was beautiful with a far-off kind of beauty, like that of the stars. And while these angry thoughts passed through Henrietta’s mind, Rose’s tender expression had developed into a smile, and she asked, “Did you have a nice walk?”