Aunt Isabelle stood for a moment looking into the fire.  “It has been years since anybody wanted me,” she said, finally.

There was no bitterness in her tone; she simply stated a fact.  Yet in her youth she had been the beauty of the family, and the toast of a county.

“Aunt Isabelle,” Mary said, suddenly, “is marriage the only way out for a woman?”

“The only way?”

“To freedom.  It seems to me that a single woman always seems to belong to her family.  Why shouldn’t you do as you please?  Why shouldn’t I?  And yet you’ve never lived your own life.  And I sha’n’t be able to live mine except by fighting every inch of the way.”

A flush stained Aunt Isabelle’s cheeks.  “I have always been poor, Mary——­”

“But that isn’t it,” fiercely.  “There are poor girls who aren’t tied—­I mean by conventions and family traditions.  Why, Aunt Isabelle, I rented the Tower Rooms not only in defiance of the living—­but of the dead.  I can see mother’s face if we had thought of such a thing while she lived.  Yet we needed the money then.  We needed it to help Dad—­to save him——­” The last words were spoken under her breath, and Aunt Isabelle did not catch them.

“And now everybody wants me to get married.  Oh, Aunt Isabelle, sit down and let’s talk it out.  I’m not sleepy, are you?” She drew the little lady beside her on the high-backed couch which faced the fire.  “Everybody wants me to get married, Aunt Isabelle.  And to-night I had it out with—­Porter.”

“You don’t love him?”

“Not—­that way.  But sometimes—­he makes me feel as if I couldn’t escape him—­as if he would persist and persist, until he won.  But I don’t want love to come to me that way.  It seems to me that if one loves, one knows.  One doesn’t have to be shown.”

“My dear, sometimes it is a tragedy when a woman knows.”

“But why?”

“Because men like to conquer.  When they see love in a woman’s eyes, their own love—­dies.”

“I should hate a man like that,” said Mary, frankly.  “If a man only loves you because of the conquest, what’s going to happen when you are married and the chase is over?  No, Aunt Isabelle, when I fall in love, it will be with a man who will know that I am the One Woman.  He must love me because I am Me—­Myself.  Not because some one else admires me, or because I can keep him guessing.  He will know me as I know him—­as his Predestined Mate!”

Thus spoke Sweet and Twenty, glowing.  And Sweet and Forty, meeting that flame with her banked fires, faltered.  “But, my dear, how can you know?”

“How did you know?”

The abrupt question drove every drop of blood from Aunt Isabelle’s face.  “Who told you?”

“Mother.  One night when I asked her why you had never married.  You don’t mind, do you?”