‘What is that duty?’ she said, almost sharply, looking up; and again there was a silence. The clergyman laboured to speak, but what was he to say? The presence of that motionless figure in the background, had there been nothing else, would have made him dumb. ‘The first thing,’ he said, ‘in ordinary circumstances--Heaven knows I speak in darkness--would be to own your position, at least, and set everything in its right place. Nature itself teaches,’ he continued, growing bolder, ‘that it is impossible to go on living in a false position, acting, if not speaking, what can be nothing but a lie.’ ‘It is commonplace, indeed,’ she cried bitterly, ‘all that: who should know it like me? But will you tell me,’ she said, rising up and sitting down in her excitement, ‘that it is my duty to leave my children who want me, and all the work of my life which there is no one else to do, for a useless existence, pleasing no one, needed by no one--a life without an object, or with a hopeless object--a duty I can never fulfil? To leave my trust,’ she went on, coming forward to the fire, leaning upon the mantelpiece, and speaking with her face flushed and her voice raised in unconscious eloquence, ‘the office I have held for so many years--my children’s guardian, their steward, their caretaker--suppose even that I had not been their mother, is a woman bidden to do all that, to make herself useless, to sacrifice what she can do as well as what she is?’ She stopped, words failing her, and stood before him, a wonderful noble figure, eloquent in every movement and gesture, in the maturity and dignity of her middle age; then suddenly broke down altogether, and, hiding her face, cried out: ‘Who am I, to speak so? Not young to be excused, not a fool to be forgiven; a woman ashamed--and for no end.’ ‘If you are married,’ said the Vicar, ‘it is no shame to marry. It may be inappropriate, unsuitable, it may be even regrettable; but it is not wrong. Do not at least take a morbid view.’ She raised her drooping head, and turned round quickly upon him. ‘What am I to do?’ she said. ‘What am I to do?’ The Vicar’s eyes stole, in spite of himself, to the other side of the room. The dark shadow there had not moved; the man still sat with his head bent between his hands. He gave no evidence that he had heard a word of the discussion; he put forth no claim except by his presence there. ‘What can I say?’ said Mr. Germaine. ‘Nothing but commonplace, nothing but what I have already said. Before everything it is your duty to put things on a right foundation; you cannot go on like this. It must be painful to do, but it is the only way.’ ‘It is seldom,’ she said, ‘very seldom that you are so precise.’ ‘Because,’ he said firmly, ‘there is no doubt on the subject. It is as clear as noonday; there is but one thing to do.’