Mrs. Vandeleur shivered, then rose abruptly and closed the window against which she leaned, gazing down at the formless mass of the shrubs which cowered over their shadows on the lawn. Her mind, vaguely troubled for some days past, and now keenly on the alert, travelled swiftly back, bridging a space of nearly twenty years, to a scene strangely like this, in which she and her mother had held the stage. She too, a girl then of Dorothy’s eighteen years, had brought the halting story of her doubts and scruples to her natural counsellor: she could remember still how the instinct of reticence had struggled with the yearning for sympathy, for the comfort of the confessional. She could recall now and appreciate her mother’s tact and patient questioning, her own perversity, the dumbness which seemed independent of her own volition. A commonplace page of life. Two men at her feet, and the girl unskilled to read her heart: one had spoken--that was Dick Vandeleur, careless, brilliant, the heir to half a county; the other--her old friend; she could not bear to think of him now. Knowledge had come too late, and the light which made her wonder scornfully at her blindness. And her mother--she of course had played the worldly part; but her counsel had been honest, without bias: it were cruel to blame her now. Loyal though she was, Margaret Vandeleur had asked herself an hundred times, yielding to that love of threading a labyrinth which rules most women, what would have been the story of her life if she had steeled herself to stand or fall by her own judgment, if she had refused to allow her mother to drop into the wavering scale the words which had turned it, ever so slightly, in favour of the richer man, the man whom she had married, whose name she bore. It seemed plain enough, to a woman’s keen vision--what sense so subtle, yet so easily beguiled--that Dorothy’s choice was embarrassed, just as her own had been. The girl and her two admirers--how the old story repeated itself!--one, Jack Wilgress, the good-natured, good-looking idler, whose devotion to the river threatened to make him amphibious, and whose passion for scribbling verse bade fair to launch him adrift among the cockle-shell fleet of Minor Poets; the other--Geoffrey Vincent! To call upon Margaret Vandeleur to guide her daughter’s choice between two men of whom Geoffrey Vincent was one--surely here was the end and crown of Fate’s relentless irony. She felt herself blushing as she pressed her forehead against the cool window-pane, put to shame by the thoughts which the comparison suggested, which would not be stifled. Right or wrong, at least her mother had been impartial: there was a sting in this, a failure of her precedent. She sighed, concluding mutely that silence was her only course; even if she would, she could not follow in her mother’s footsteps--the girl must abide by her own judgment.