"No, I could not do that without sacrificing that pride of womanhood without which a woman is nothing and worse than nothing. No, that can never be. I wonder why he does not himself offer an explanation and seek a restoration of old relations? No, that can never be. It would involve such a sacrifice of manhood as is inconceivable. There is never any explanation possible, never any solution to this riddle, never anything." She sat still for awhile, not thinking at all. Suddenly she reflected: "After all it is his happiness that I care for. My own is of no consequence. He is a man, and it will be easy for him to transfer his affections. Men are not like women in that way. Millicent will make a fitter wife for him than I ever could. He will be happy with her, and as for me--well, it doesn't matter. I have my duties and my occupations. The rest is of no consequence. He shall love Millicent and marry her, and may be, when I'm an old, old woman, he and I will come to understand each other again, at least so far that neither shall accuse the other of treachery." With a mind attuned to the great renunciation, she called to Michael and bade him drive back to The Oaks. XXVI MOONLIGHT RESOLUTIONS Millicent Danvers was a frank, open-minded young woman, almost childlike in her simplicity of soul in every case where candor was met with equal candor. But her childlikeness included a child's subtle instinct as to the moods and motives of others, and where affection prompted her scrutiny she was not often at fault in her judgments of human conduct. When Margaret, refusing her company, drove away that night Millicent knew perfectly that her friend's spirit was disturbed in some unusual way, for until then these two had been comrades in every such expedition, and Margaret had been the one most insistent that they should be so. "I want you to see every phase of our Virginia life," she had many times said, "so that when you go back to Boston you may know what there is in it to approve, what to admire, what to condemn, and what merely to laugh at. For I'm sure there is much in it that must strike Northern people as ludicrous. Anyhow I want you to see it all and understand all of it. Then I'm not afraid to trust our life and our ways and our impulses to your hands for explanation and exposition to people who are ignorant of them or know them only by prejudiced hearsay." The events of this day, and especially Margaret's own conduct had been so different from all this as to awaken curiosity and compel attention. Both the curiosity and the attention had a deep and sincere affection for their prompting. When Margaret drove away and the late rising, gibbous moon appeared above the tree tops and shone softly through the windows of Millicent's southeast room, the girl sat down there by a casement to wonder, to conjecture, to "guess," and, better still, to "think this thing out to the end."