“The right of a friend, then, Anne. Won’t you even allow me that? You’ve treated me as a friend since you asked me to come back. You’ve trusted me, or seemed to. Trust me now. I did what I did because I knew you ought not to marry Major Fenno. I’ve known him for a great many years. I knew he couldn’t make you happy--make any woman happy. Some men are not meant to marry; he’s one of them. I know enough of his history to know that. And you see he recognized that I was right--” Anne was still staring at her with the same fixed implacable brows. Then her face broke up into the furrows of young anguish, and she became again a helpless grief-tossed girl, battling blindly with her first sorrow. She flung up her arms, buried her head in them, and sank down by the sofa. Kate watched her for a moment, hesitating; then she stole up and laid an arm about the bowed neck. But Anne shook her off and sprang up. “No--no--no!” she cried. They stood facing each other, as on that other cruel night. “You don’t know me; you don’t understand me. What right have you to interfere with my happiness? Won’t you please say nothing more now? It was my own fault to imagine that we could ever live together like mother and daughter. A relation like that can’t be improvised in a day.” She flung a tragic look at her mother. “If you’ve suffered, I suppose it was my fault for asking you to make the experiment. Excuse me if I’ve said anything to hurt you. But you must leave me to manage my life in my own way.” She turned toward the door. “Goodnight--my child,” Kate whispered. XVII. Two days later Fred Landers returned. Mrs. Clephane had sent a note begging him to call her up as soon as he arrived. When his call came she asked if she might dine with him that night, and he replied that she ought to have come without asking. Anne, he supposed, would honour him too? No, she answered; Anne, the day before, had gone down to the Drovers’ on Long Island. She would probably be away for a few days. And would Fred please ask no one else to dine? He assured her that such an idea would never have occurred to him. He received her in the comfortable shabby drawing-room which he had never changed since his mother and an old-maid sister had vanished from it years before. He indulged his own tastes in the library upstairs, leaving this chintzy room, with its many armchairs, the Steinway piano and the family Chippendale, much as Kate had known it when old Mrs. Landers had given her a bridal dinner. The memory of that dinner, and of Mrs. Landers, large, silvery, demonstrative, flashed through Mrs. Clephane’s mind. She saw herself in an elaborately looped gown, proudly followed by her husband, and enclosed in her hostess’s rustling embrace, while her present host, crimson with emotion and admiration, hung shyly behind his mother; and the memory gave her a pang of self-pity.