To Mrs. Selwyn, the breaking off of Sara’s engagement, and the manner of it, signified very little.  She watched the panorama of other people’s lives unfold with considerably less sympathetic concern than that with which one follows the ups and downs that befall the characters in a cinema drama, since they were altogether outside the radius of that central topic of unfailing interest—­herself.

The only way in which recent events impinged upon her life was in so far as the rupture of Sara’s engagement would probably mean the indefinite prolongation of her stay at Sunnyside, which would otherwise have ended with her marriage.  And this, from Mrs. Selwyn’s egotistical point of view, was all to the good, since Sara had acquired a pleasant habit of making herself both useful and entertaining to the invalid.

Molly’s emotions carried her to the other extreme of the compass.  Since the night when she had realized that she had narrowly missed making entire shipwreck of her life, thanks to the evil genius of Lester Kent, her character seemed to have undergone a change—­to have deepened and expanded.  She was no longer so buoyantly superficial in her envisagement of life, and the big things reacted on her in a way which would previously have been impossible.  Formerly, their significance would have passed her by, and she would have floated airily along, unconscious of their piercing reality.

Side by side with this increase of vision, there had developed a very deep and sincere affection for both Garth and Sara based, probably, in its inception, on her realization that whatever of good, whatever of happiness, life might hold for her, she would owe it fundamentally to the two who had so determinedly kept her heedless feet from straying into that desert from which there is no returning to the pleasant paths of righteousness.  A censorious world sees carefully to that, for ever barring out the sinner—­of the weaker sex—­from inheriting the earth.

So that to this new and awakened Molly the abrupt termination of Sara’s engagement came as something almost too overwhelming to be borne.  She did not see how Sara could bear it, and to her youthful mind, mercifully unwitting that grief is one of the world’s commonplaces, Sara was henceforth haloed with sorrow, set specially apart by the tragic circumstances which had enveloped her.  Unconsciously she lowered her voice when speaking to her, infusing a certain specific sympathy into every small action she performed for her, shrank from troubling her in any way, and altogether, in her youth and inexperience, behaved rather as though she were in a house of mourning, where the candles yet burned in the chamber of death and the blinds shut out the light of day.

At last Sara rebelled, although compassionately aware of Molly’s excellent intentions.

“Molly, my angel, if you persist in treating me as though I had just lost the whole of my relatives in an earthquake or a wreck at sea, I shall explode.  I’ve had a bad knock, but I don’t want it continually rubbing into me.  The world will go on—­even although my engagement is broken off.  And I’m going on.”