generations.  In four days Ethel was to be married.  Already for more than three months Rose had been in London, and in a fortnight Leonora was to take Millicent there.  And when Ethel was married and perhaps a mother, and Rose versed and absorbed in the art and craft of obstetrics, and the name of Millicent familiar in the mouths of clubmen, what was Leonora to do then?  She could not control her daughters; she could scarcely guide them.  Ethel knew only one law, Fred’s wish; and Rose had too much intellect, and Millicent too little heart, to submit to her.  Since John’s death the house had been the abode of peace and amiability, but it had also been Liberty Hall.  If sometimes Leonora regretted that she could not more dominantly impress herself upon her children, she never doubted that on the whole the new republic was preferable to the old tyranny.  What then had she to do?  She had to watch over her girls, and especially over Rose and Milly.  And as she sat in the garden with Bran at her feet, in the solitude which foreshadowed the more poignant solitude to come, she said to herself with passionate maternity:  ’I shall watch over them.  If anything occurs I shall always be ready.’  And this blissful and transforming thought, this vehement purpose, allayed somewhat the misgivings which she had long had about Millicent, and which her recent glimpses into the factitious and erratic world of the theatre had only served to increase.

It was Milly’s affair which had at length brought Leonora to the point of communicating with Arthur Twemlow.  In the first weeks of widowhood, the most terrible of her life, she could not dream of writing to him.  Then the sacrifice had dimly shaped itself in her mind, and while actually engaged in fighting against it she hesitated to send any message whatever.  And when she realised that the sacrifice was inevitable for her, when she inwardly knew that Arthur and the splendid rushing life of New York must be renounced in obedience to the double instinct of maternity and of repentance, she could not write.  She felt timorous; she was unable to frame the sentences.  And she procrastinated, ruled by her characteristic quality of supineness.  Once she heard that he had been over to London and gone back; she drew a deep breath as though a peril had been escaped, and procrastinated further.  Then came the overtures from Lionel Belmont, or at least from his agents, to Milly.  Belmont was a New Yorker, and the notion suddenly struck her of writing to Arthur for information about Belmont.  It was a capricious notion, but it provided an extrinsic excuse for a letter which might be followed by another of more definite import.  In the end she was obliged to yield to it.  She wrote, as she had performed every act of her relationship with Arthur, unwillingly, in spite of her reason, governed by a strange and arbitrary impulse.  No sooner was the letter in the pillar-box than she began to wonder what Arthur would say in his response, and how she should answer