“What has happened?  Who has been here?”

“Maria—­sneering at Charles’s ideas, asking me questions, petting me and pitying me and making a baby of me, until I broke down at last and wanted all the things she wanted to have done, and let her kiss me good-bye for her kindness in doing them—­”

In a passion of tears she walked up and down, up and down the room, as her father does, except with that quick, nervous grace she always has, and in a painful, sobbing excitement.

Every sense I had was for an instant’s passage fused in one clear, concentrated anger against a sister who could play so ruthlessly upon my poor child’s woman pulses and emotions, so disarm her of her self-control and right free spirit.

“Why did she come?” I said, at last, with the best calmness I could muster.  Peggy stood still for a moment, startled by a coldness in my voice I couldn’t alter.

“She came to find out about things for herself.  Then when she did find out about Charles’s way of helping us she simply hated it—­and she sent me after—­after the letter you had.  I got it from your desk, and Maria took it to find out its real address.”

At that she sank again in a chair, and buried her face in her hands, hardly knowing what she was saying.  “Oh, what shall I do?  What shall I do?” she repeated, softly and wildly.  “Yesterday I could behave so well by what I knew was true about him.  Then, when Maria came and spoke as though I was three years old, and hadn’t any understanding nor any dignity of my own, and the best thing for any girl, at any rate, were to cling to the man she loved as though she were his mother and he were her dear, erring child” (she began to laugh a little), “the feebler he were the more credit to her for her devotion—­then I couldn’t go on by what I knew was true about him—­only back, back again to all my—­old mistake.”  She was laughing and crying now with little, quick gasps, in a sheer hysteria which no doubt would have given her sister entire satisfaction as a manifesto of her normal womanliness.

I brought her a glass of water, and, trying to conceal my own distress for her as well as I could, sat down, silently, near her.  Gradually she grew quieter, until the room was so still that we could hear the raindrops from the eaves plash down outside.  Peggy pushed back her cloud of bright hair and fastened it in the nape of her neck.  At last she said, with conviction:  “Mother, Maria didn’t say these things, but I know she thinks them for me, thinks that a woman’s love is just all forgiveness and indulgence.  By that she could—­she did work on my nerves.  But”—­and her gray eyes glanced so beautifully and so darkly with a girl’s fine, straight, native, healthy spirit as she said it—­“I couldn’t marry any man but one that I admired.”

“I’m sure you couldn’t,” I said, firmly.  “And, my dear child, I must confess I fail to understand why your sister should wish so patronizingly for you a fortune she would never have accepted for herself.  How can she possibly like for you such a mawkish and a morbid thing as the prospect of a marriage with a man in whom neither you nor any other person feels the presence of one single absolute and manly quality?”