She had waked to overspreading gloom in the House of Heth; but this she could have fronted cheerfully to-day, fortified to charm it away, for herself and others.  If events of late had been sweeping her along too fast, one emotion crowded unsteadyingly upon another, nature, stepping in, had put the gentle punctuation where it was needed.  Hers was the resilience of youth.  And the second cataclysm in the House, even at its worst (which was what mamma had made it), was hardly comparable to the first.  There was no spiritual abasement this time, no sense of calamity and worlds at end.  Rather, indeed, the contrary:  and it was here that was found the seriousness of it all, in that now the smash-up was her own deliberate doing.  Cally had hardly needed her mother’s savage outbreak to make her feel how definite a parting was here with the ideals and aspirations of a lifetime.  She saw that one whole phase of her girlhood had passed away forever.  Or, it might be, this that she had said good-bye to was the dim figure of her girlhood itself....

In these thoughts there was sadness, naturally.  Hugo’s going had been with the noises of breakage, the reverberations of the day of judgment.  But Cally had had four days to put her house in order; and she felt that she would have waked almost happy to-day, but for this stranger cloud that still hung so dark upon the horizon....

It was such a day as October in this climate brings week on week, gloriously golden.  Cally breakfasted in bed.  Toward ten o’clock, as she was slowly dressing with the maid’s assistance, word came that her mother desired her presence in the administrative bedroom below.

“Very well, Annie,” said the girl, listlessly.  “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

The message came as something of a surprise, though a disciplinary intent was easily surmised behind it.  In the interview the other night, mamma had formally washed her hands of Cally and all her flare-ups, more than intimating that henceforward they would live as comparative strangers.  Since then there had come nothing from the staunch little general, who also had remained in her tent, not ill, but permanently aloof and unreconciled.  Very different, as it chanced, was the note struck by papa, who had come twice a day, and sometimes thrice, to the sick-room, ostentatiously cheery in his manner, but obviously depressed underneath by the dreary atmosphere enveloping the house.  Never, it seemed, had papa been tenderer or more affectionate than in these bedside visits:  so that Cally, with her sense of a guilty secret, could hardly bear to look at his kind, worried face.

And she had opened her eyes on the day of wellness with the knowledge that she must put her hand to this cloud now, though she brought down the skies with it.  Nothing, it was clear, could be worse than this.  To-night, after dinner, she must follow her father into the study, say what she must say.  Her mind had returned and clung to the solid arguments of Hen and others.  She knew that the memory of the bunching-room had got upon her nerves; entwined and darkened itself with other painful things; assumed fantastic and horrid shapes.  Perhaps the dreaded interview would not be so very bad, after all.  Surely her father could not wear that kind look for nothing....