He was not offended; he only spoke his mind rather plainly to them all, which, though it did no harm, did little good either; they were too old in their sins to profit by that now.  After some more unpleasant talk all round, the family conclave broke up; Mr. Frazer came home, and every one went to bed.

Mr. Ponsonby had Julia’s tiny room; there was nowhere else for him, seeing Violet and her husband had the one she and her youngest sister shared in their maiden days.  Julia had to content herself with the drawing-room sofa; it was a very uncomfortable sofa, and the blankets kept slipping off so she did not sleep a great deal; but that did not matter much; she had the more time to think things over.  Dawn found her sitting at the table wrapped in her blanket, writing by the light of one of the piano candles; she glanced up as the first cold light struggled in, and her face was very grave, it looked old, too, and tired, with the weariness which accompanies renunciation, quite as often as does peace or a sense of beatitude.  She looked at the paper before her, a completely worked-out table of expenditure, a sort of statement of ways and means—­the means being L50 a year.  It could be done; she knew that during the night when the plan took shape in her mind; she had proved it to herself more than half-an-hour ago by figures—­but there was no margin.  It could only be done by renouncing that upon which she had set her heart; she could not work out the scheme and pay the debt of honour to Rawson-Clew.  The legacy had at first seemed a heaven-sent gift for that purpose, but now, like the blue daffodil, it seemed that it could not be used to pay the debt.  That was not to be paid by a heaven-sent gift any more than by a devil-helped theft; slow, honest work and patient saving might pay it in years, but nothing else it seemed.  She put her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her locked hands looking down at the unanswerable figures, but they still told her the same hard truth.

“I might save it in time; I could do without this—­and this,” she told herself.  It is so easy to do without oneself when one’s mind is set on some purpose, but one has no right to expect others to do without, too—­the whole thing would be no good if the others had to; she knew that.  No, the debt could not be paid this way; she had no right to do it; it was her own fancy, her hobby, perhaps.  No one demanded that it should be paid; law did not compel it; Rawson-Clew did not expect it; her father considered that it no longer existed; it was to please herself and herself alone that she would pay it, and her pleasure must wait.

Possibly she did not reason quite all this; she only knew that she could not do what she had set her heart on doing with the first of Aunt Jane’s money, and the renunciation cost her much, and gave her no satisfaction at all.  But the matter once decided, she put it at the back of her mind, and by breakfast time she was her usual self; to tell the truth, she was looking forward to a skirmish with Uncle William, and that cheered her.