"But--" she began. Then the immense relief of it suddenly flooded her whole being with a delicious warm softness. They did know. Somehow. And a miracle had happened. Oh, how _kind_ God was! She dropped on her knees by the sofa and began to kiss her mother's hand, which surprised Mrs. Bullivant; and indeed it is a foreign trick, picked up mostly by those who go abroad. "Mother," she said, "are you really pleased about it? You don't mind then?" "Mind?" said Mrs. Bullivant. "Oh, how glad, how glad I am. And father? What does he say? Does he--does _he_ mind?" "Mind?" repeated Mrs. Bullivant. "Father is very pleased, I think," said Judith, with what in one less lovely would have been a slight pursing of the lips. And she twisted a remarkable diamond ring she was wearing straight. "Father is--pleased?" echoed Ingeborg, quite awe-struck by the amount and quality of these reliefs. "I must say I think it is really _good_ of your dear father to be pleased, when he loses--" began Mrs. Bullivant. "Oh, yes, yes," interrupted the overcome Ingeborg, "it's a wonder--a wonder of God." "Ingeborg dear," her mother gently rebuked, for this was excess; and Judith looked still more what would have been a little pursed in any other woman. "When he loses," then resumed Mrs. Bullivant with the plaintive determination of one who considers it the least she may expect as a sofa-ridden mother to be allowed to finish her sentences, "so much." "Yes, yes," assented Ingeborg eagerly, whose appreciation of her parents' attitude was so warm that she almost felt she must stay and bask in its urbanity forever and not go away after all to the bleak distance of East Prussia. "Your father loses not _only_ a daughter," continued Mrs. Bullivant, "but £500 a year of his income." "Would one call it his income?" inquired Judith, politely but yet, if one could suspect a being with an angel's face of such a thing, with some slight annoyance. "I thought our grandmother--" "Judith dear, the £500 a year your grandmother left to each of you was only to be yours when you married," explained Mrs. Bullivant, also with some slight annoyance beneath her patience. "Till you married it was to be mine--your father's, I mean, of course. And if you never did marry it would have been mine--I mean his--always."