During the night, she had not looked an inch beyond her blind passion of insistence.  Now that Aunt Victoria yielded with so disconcerting a suddenness, she faced with a pang what lay beyond.  “Oh, Judith wouldn’t cast him off!  She loves him so!  She’ll give him a chance.  You don’t know Judith.  She doesn’t care about many things, but she gives herself up absolutely to those that do matter to her.  She adores Arnold!  It fairly frightened me to see how she was burning up when he was near.  She’ll insist on his reforming, of course—­she ought to—­but—­”

“Suppose he doesn’t reform to suit her,” suggested Mrs. Marshall-Smith, stirring her coffee.  “He’s been reformed at intervals ever since he was fifteen.  He never could stay through a whole term in any decent boys’ school.”  Here was a vista, ruthlessly opened.  Sylvia’s eyes looked down it and shuddered.  “Poor Arnold!” she said under her breath, pushing away her untasted cup.

“I’m dull enough to find you take an odd way to show your sympathy for him,” murmured Mrs. Marshall-Smith, with none of the acidity the words themselves seemed to indicate.  She seemed indeed genuinely perplexed.  “It’s not been exactly a hilarious element in my life either.  But I’ve always tried to hold on to Arnold.  I thought it my duty.  And now, since Felix Morrison has found this excellent specialist for me, it’s much easier.  I telegraph to him and he comes at once and takes Arnold back to his sanitarium, till he’s himself again.”  For the first time in weeks Morrison’s name brought up between them no insistently present, persistently ignored shadow.  The deeper shadow now blotted him out.

“But Aunt Victoria, it’s for Judith to decide. She’ll do the right thing.”

“Sometimes people are thrown by circumstances into a situation where they wouldn’t have dreamed of putting themselves—­and yet they rise to it and conquer it,” philosophized Aunt Victoria.  “Life takes hold of us with strong hands and makes us greater than we thought.  Judith will mean to do the right thing.  If she were married, she’d have to do it!  It seems to me a great responsibility you take, Sylvia—­you may, with the best of intentions in the world, be ruining the happiness of two lives.”

Sylvia got up, her eyes red with unshed tears.  It was not the first time that morning.  “It’s all too horrible,” she murmured.  “But I haven’t any right to conceal it from Judith.”

Her eyes were still red when, an hour later, she stepped into the room again and said, “I’ve mailed it.”

Her aunt, still in lavender silk negligee, so far progressed towards the day’s toilet as to have her hair carefully dressed, looked up from the Revue Bleue, and nodded.  Her expression was one of quiet self-possession.