The avowal was made quietly, with the still bearing of one who gives a few drops of confession out of deep oceans of reserve.  Miss Lucilla gazed at her in astonishment.  That her parents should sacrifice her was not surprising; but that she should be willing to sacrifice herself went beyond the limits of thought.  The revelation that Marion could actually love the man was so startling that it shocked her out of her timidity, loosening the strings of her eloquence and unsealing the sources of her maternal tenderness.  There was nothing original in Miss Lucilla’s subsequent line of argument.  It was the old, oft-uttered, futile appeal to the head, when the heart has already spoken.  It premised the possibility of placing one’s affections where one cannot give one’s respect, regardless of the fact that the thing is done a thousand times a day.  It reasoned, it predicted, it implored, with an effect no more disintegrating on the girl’s decision than moonbeams make upon a mountain.  Through it all, she sat and listened with the veiled eyes and mysterious impassivity which gave to her personality a curiously incalculable quality, as of a force presenting none of the ordinary phenomena by which to measure or compute it.

It was not till Miss Lucilla touched on the subject of honor that she obtained any sign of the effect she was producing.  It was no more, on Marion’s part, than an uneasy movement, but it betrayed its cause.  Miss Lucilla pressed her point with renewed insistence, and presently two big tears hung on the long, black lashes and rolled down.

“I should like to see Mrs. Eveleth.”

Like the hasty raising and dropping of a curtain on some jealously guarded view, the words gave to Miss Lucilla but a fleeting glimpse of what was passing in the obscure recesses of the girl’s heart; but she determined to make the most of it by fixing, there and then, the day and hour when, without apparently forcing the event, the two might come face to face on the neutral ground of Gramercy Park.

It was a meeting that, when it took place, would have been attended with embarrassment had not both young women been practised in the ways of their little world.  Progress in mutual understanding was made the easier by the existence, on both sides, of the European view of life, with its fusion of interests, its softness of outline, its give and take of toleration, in contradistinction to the sharp, clear, insistent American demands for a certain line of conduct and no other.  Five minutes had not gone by in talk before each found in the other’s presence that sense of repose which comes from similar habits of thought and a common native idiom.  Whatever grounds for difference they might find, they were, at least, ranged on the same side in that battle which the two hemispheres half unconsciously wage upon each other as to the main purposes of life.  Thus they were able to approach their subject without that first preliminary shock which makes it difficult for races to agree; and thus, too, Marion Grimston found herself, before she was aware of it, pouring out to Diane Eveleth that heart which, in response to Miss Lucilla’s tender pleading, had been dumb.