Cara’s independence and air of breezy emancipation, had come by degrees, ever since she had gone to live with her friend Berthe Baer on the slopes of the Drei Linden. This change of abode and surroundings had given her an air of freedom and self-sufficiency, and she now ruled her mother with an absolute sway. Grown up, her own mistress, and on the threshold of life, she was resolved to make the best of her youth and have a really good time; since hers was a hard, shrewd, and absolutely pleasure-loving character. Cara was fond in a way of her pretty girlish Mum,--who was so often and so annoyingly mistaken for her sister--but the Mum was so tame, unenterprising, and easily contented; her books and work and walks, were all _she_ asked for; but Cara, notwithstanding her sharp sight, was mistaken. Her mother was far from being contented. As she rambled alone, or sat at her lace cushion, her thoughts, though inarticulate, were many and rebellious; they spoke a plain language, and put many crucial questions to her heart, and brain. In her life of thirty-five years, she humbly confessed to many fatal errors. Her first mistake, was in marrying Hugo Blagdon--that was an act of sheer cowardice. The second, her muddled runaway; the third, in refusing Lancelot Lumley’s appeal made six years previously. Cara, she now realised, was capable of standing alone, and successfully fighting her own battles. Her determination to live in Lucerne, had proved this most decisively; and now she and her girl were no longer so much to one another. Cara demanded a separate bedroom. “Two in a room was so stuffy,” and there were no nightly talks and confidences, and any hold she ever had on her child, was imperceptibly slipping away; the girl had her own friends, Luisa Maas, Hilda Vorgen, and the Baers, with whom she boarded. She and Berthe were inseparable, and Berthe, a simple-minded, giggling, good-tempered girl of eighteen, could do her darling no harm. One question repeatedly thrust itself forward with irrepressible pertinacity: “Had she brought Cara up wisely? Had she not been _too_ indulgent?”