The subjects uppermost in the minds of the two women who had thus cooled from their fires, were not the visionary ones of the later hours, but the hard facts of their earlier conversation.  After a remark that Cytherea need not assist her in dressing unless she wished to, Miss Aldclyffe said abruptly—­

‘I can tell that young man’s name.’  She looked keenly at Cytherea.  ‘It is Edward Springrove, my tenant’s son.’

The inundation of colour upon the younger lady at hearing a name which to her was a world, handled as if it were only an atom, told Miss Aldclyffe that she had divined the truth at last.

‘Ah—­it is he, is it?’ she continued.  ’Well, I wanted to know for practical reasons.  His example shows that I was not so far wrong in my estimate of men after all, though I only generalized, and had no thought of him.’  This was perfectly true.

‘What do you mean?’ said Cytherea, visibly alarmed.

’Mean?  Why that all the world knows him to be engaged to be married, and that the wedding is soon to take place.’  She made the remark bluntly and superciliously, as if to obtain absolution at the hands of her family pride for the weak confidences of the night.

But even the frigidity of Miss Aldclyffe’s morning mood was overcome by the look of sick and blank despair which the carelessly uttered words had produced upon Cytherea’s face.  She sank back into a chair, and buried her face in her hands.

‘Don’t be so foolish,’ said Miss Aldclyffe.  ’Come, make the best of it.  I cannot upset the fact I have told you of, unfortunately.  But I believe the match can be broken off.’

‘O no, no.’

’Nonsense.  I liked him much as a youth, and I like him now.  I’ll help you to captivate and chain him down.  I have got over my absurd feeling of last night in not wanting you ever to go away from me—­of course, I could not expect such a thing as that.  There, now I have said I’ll help you, and that’s enough.  He’s tired of his first choice now that he’s been away from home for a while.  The love that no outer attack can frighten away quails before its idol’s own homely ways; it is always so. . . .  Come, finish what you are doing if you are going to, and don’t be a little goose about such a trumpery affair as that.’

‘Who—­is he engaged to?’ Cytherea inquired by a movement of her lips but no sound of her voice.  But Miss Aldclyffe did not answer.  It mattered not, Cytherea thought.  Another woman—­that was enough for her:  curiosity was stunned.

She applied herself to the work of dressing, scarcely knowing how.  Miss Aldclyffe went on:—­

’You were too easily won.  I’d have made him or anybody else speak out before he should have kissed my face for his pleasure.  But you are one of those precipitantly fond things who are yearning to throw away their hearts upon the first worthless fellow who says good-morning.  In the first place, you shouldn’t have loved him so quickly:  in the next, if you must have loved him off-hand, you should have concealed it.  It tickled his vanity:  “By Jove, that girl’s in love with me already!” he thought.’