“Well!” repeated Alice, with a frown of astonishment.  “Don’t you see that he’s promised us one thing and her another, and that he’s false to both?”

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Pasmer, recovering her good-humour in view of a situation that she felt herself able to cope with.  “Of course he has to temporise, to manage a little.  She’s an invalid, and of course she’s very exacting.  He has to humour her.  How do you know he has promised her?  He hasn’t promised us.”

“Hasn’t promised us?” Alice gasped.

“No.  He’s simply fallen in with what we’ve said.  It’s because he’s so sweet and yielding, and can’t bear to refuse.  I can understand it perfectly.”

“Then if he hasn’t promised us, he’s deceived us all the more shamefully, for he’s made us think he had.”

“He hasn’t me,” said Mrs. Pasmer, smiling at the stormy virtue in her daughter’s face.  “And what if you should go home awhile with him—­for the summer, say?  It couldn’t last longer, much; and it wouldn’t hurt us to wait.  I suppose he hoped for something of that kind.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” groaned the girl, in a kind of bewilderment.  “I could have gone there with him joyfully, and lived all my days, if he’d only been frank with me.”

“Oh no, you couldn’t,” said her mother, with cosy security.  “When it comes to it, you don’t like giving up any more than other people.  It’s very hard for you to give up; he sees that—­he knows it, and he doesn’t really like to ask any sort of sacrifice from you.  He’s afraid of you.”

“Don’t I know that?” demanded Alice desolately:  “I’ve known it from the first, and I’ve felt it all the time.  It’s all a mistake, and has been.  We never could understand each other.  We’re too different.”

“That needn’t prevent you understanding him.  It needn’t prevent you from seeing how really kind and good he is—­how faithful and constant he is.”

“Oh, you say that—­you praise him—­because you like him.”

“Of course I do.  And can’t you?”

“No.  The least grain of deceit—­of temporising, you call it—­spoils everything.  It’s over,” said the girl, rising, with a sigh, from the chair she had dropped into.  “We’re best apart; we could only have been wretched and wicked together.”

“What did you say to him, Alice?” asked her mother, unshaken by her rhetoric.

“I told him he was a faithless person.”

“Then you were a cruel girl,” cried Mrs. Pasmer, with sudden indignation; “and if you were not my daughter I could be glad he had escaped you.  I don’t know where you got all those silly, romantic notions of yours about these things.  You certainly didn’t get them from me,” she continued, with undeniable truth, “and I don’t believe you get them from your Church, It’s just as Miss Anderson said:  your Church makes allowance for human nature, but you make none.”

“I shouldn’t go to Julia Anderson for instruction in such matters,” said the girl, with cold resentment.