Yet how was it that, under so manly and sweet an appeal straight to her woman’s heart, she had not instantly subsided on the shoulder of her contrite lover, with grateful tears?  Cally herself hardly understood.  She was, truth to tell, secretly surprised and thrilled by her own high-handedness.  To what degree she and her former betrothed had remet under permanently changed conditions, it was beyond her thought to try to analyse now.  Perhaps it was only the completeness of her triumph that had so fired her feminine independence.  Had she met Hugo by chance, and found him lukewarm, doubt not that she would have striven to fan the embers....

She had followed her intuitions, which never reason, and when she said that she was now disciplining her prodigal, she spoke out her actual feelings as far as she herself understood them; feelings, they were, which had a deep root far back in all the summer’s unhappiness.  There was a sentence of Hugo’s last May:  "I asked one girl to be my wife; have you the right to offer me another?" She would make Hugo pay a little more for that remark, now that she could just as easily as not.

Like Aaron’s rod, the return of Canning had swallowed up all other facts of the girl’s existence, or nearly all.  She was lifted, as on wings, out of the slough of her despond.  Nevertheless, the news heard at the Settlement recurred even now; and when Mrs. Heth appeared in the bedroom, just after eight, Carlisle greeted her with: 

“Has papa gone out, mamma?”

Mamma said no, papa was in the study, though Mr. MacQueen was with him just at the moment.  Something about installing some new machines at the Works, she believed....

“That will do, Flora—­Miss Carlisle has everything she needs....”  And then the good lady said, with a smile so knowing as to amount to a tremendous wink:  “You are going to tell your father to-night....  That’s right, my dear—­”

Cally gave a burst of gay laughter, declaring that there was not one earthly thing to tell.

“Of course, darling, mamma understands,” said that lady, promptly, with her unconquerable beam.

And a few moments later she added: 

“Cally, I was just thinking—­no harm in being forehanded, as I always say!...  Considering all the circumstances, what would you say to a small, dignified home-wedding, with two or four bridesmaids, and a large breakfast to the most intimate friends?”

Cally was even more amused....

There hovered over her in this moment, however clearly she knew it, an immense pressure, born both within and without—­pressure of her own lifelong mental habits and ideals, of her parents’ wishes, strengthened by the family’s late loss of prestige, pressure of public opinion, of orthodox standards, of manifest destiny, of the whole air she breathed—­driving her, quite irrespective of the heart question, straight to brilliant success in Hugo’s waiting arms.  The wing of this vast body brushed Cally’s cheek now, in mamma’s cooing notes.  She felt it, but only smiled.  A new strength possessed her; she was her own girl now as never before.