The summons which had taken her home had been a peremptory one.  Her mother, who had been ill for a good many months, had suddenly suffered some brain injury, which had reduced her to a childish helplessness.  She did not recognize Elizabeth, and though she was very soon out of physical danger, the mental disaster remained.  A good nurse was now more to her than the daughter to whom she had been devoted.  A good nurse was in charge, and Elizabeth had persuaded an elderly cousin, living on a small annuity, to come and share her mother’s rooms.  Now what was more necessary than ever was—­money!  Elizabeth’s salary was indispensable.

Was she to allow fine feelings about Pamela to drive her out of her post and her earnings—­to the jeopardy not only of her mother’s comfort, but of the good—­the national—­work open to her at Mannering?

But there was a much more agitating question behind.  She had only trifled with it till now.  But on the night of her return it pressed.  And as a reasonable woman, thirty years of age, she proceeded to look it in the face.

When Captain Dell so opportunely—­or inconveniently—­knocked at the library door, Mr. Mannering was on the point of asking his secretary to marry him.  Of that Elizabeth was sure.

She had just escaped, but the siege would be renewed.  How was she going to meet it?

Why shouldn’t she marry the Squire?  She was poor, but she had qualities much more valuable to the Squire than money.  She could rescue him from debt, put his estate on a paying footing, restore Mannering, rebuild the village, and all the time keep him happy by her sympathy with and understanding of his classical studies and hobbies.

And thereby she would be doing not only a private but a public service.  The Mannering estate and its owner had been an offence to the patriotism of a whole neighbourhood.  Elizabeth could and would put an end to that.  She had already done much to modify it.  In her Greek scholarship, and her ready wits, she possessed all the spells that were wanted for the taming of the Squire.

As to the Squire himself?  She examined the matter dispassionately.  He was fifty-two—­sound in wind and limb—­a gentleman in spite of all his oddities and tempers—­and one of the best Greek scholars of his day.  She could make her own terms.  ’I would take his name—­give him my time, my brains, my friendship—­in time, no doubt, my affection.’  He would not ask for more.  The modern woman, no longer young, an intellectual, with a man’s work to do, can make of marriage what she pleases.  The possibilities of the relations between men and women in the future are many, and the psychology of them unexplored.  Elizabeth was beginning to think her own case out, when, suddenly, she felt the tears running over her cheeks.

She was back in past days.  Mannering had vanished.  Oh—­for love!—­for youth!—­for the broken faith and the wounded trust!—­for the first fresh wine of life that, once dashed from the lips, the gods offer no more!  She found herself sobbing helplessly, not for her actual lost lover, who had passed out of her life, but for those beautiful ghosts at whose skirts she seemed to be clutching—­youth itself, love itself.