Mrs. Marshall-Smith, alarmed by the prospect of a passage-at-arms, decreed quietly that they should both sleep on the question and take it up the next morning.  Sylvia had not slept.  She had lain in her bed, wide-eyed; a series of pictures passing before her eyes with the unnatural vividness of hallucinations.  These pictures were not only of Arnold, of Arnold again, of Arnold and Judith.  There were all sorts of odd bits of memories—­a conversation overheard years before, between her father and Lawrence, when Lawrence was a little, little boy.  He had asked—­it was like Lawrence’s eerie ways—­apropos of nothing at all, “What sort of a man was Aunt Victoria’s husband?”

His father had said, “A rich man, very rich.”  This prompt appearance of readiness to answer had silenced the child for a moment:  and then (Sylvia could see his thin little hands patting down the sand-cake he was making) he had persisted, “What kind of a rich man?” His father had said, “Well, he was bald—­quite bald—­Lawrence, come run a race with me to the woodshed.”  Sylvia now, ten years later, wondered why her father had evaded.  What kind of a man had Arnold’s father been?

But chiefly she braced herself for the struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning.  It came to her in fleeting glimpses that Aunt Victoria would be only human if she resented with some heat this entire disregard of her wishes; that the discussion might very well end in a quarrel, and that a quarrel would mean the end of Lydford with all that Lydford meant now and potentially.  But this perception was swept out of sight, like everything else, in the singleness of her conviction:  “Judith must know!  Judith must know!”

There was, however, no struggle with Aunt Victoria in the morning.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith, encountering the same passionate outcry, recognized an irresistible force when she encountered it; recognized it, in fact, soon enough to avoid the long-drawn-out acrimony of discussion into which a less intelligent woman would inevitably have plunged; recognized it almost, but not quite, in time to shut off from Sylvia’s later meditations certain startling vistas down which she had now only fleeting glimpses.  “Very well, my dear,” said Mrs. Marshall-Smith, her cherished clarity always unclouded by small resentments,—­“very well, we will trust in your judgment rather than my own.  I don’t pretend to understand present-day girls, though I manage to be very fond of one of them.  Judith is your sister.  You will do, of course, what you think is right.  It means, of course, Judith being what she is, that she will instantly cast him off; and Arnold being what he is, that means that he will drink himself into delirium tremens in six months.  His father ...”  She stopped short, closing with some haste the door to a vista, and poured herself another cup of coffee.  They were having breakfast in her room, both in negligee and lacy caps, two singularly handsome representatives of differing generations.  Mrs. Marshall-Smith looked calm, Sylvia extremely agitated.  She had been awake at the early hour of deadly pale dawn when a swift, long-barreled car had drawn up under the porte-cochere and Arnold had been taken away under the guard of a short, broad, brawny man with disproportionately long arms.  She was not able to swallow a mouthful of breakfast.