Then she sent Mrs. Pasmer a slip of paper on which she had written, “Not coming.”

It has been the experience of every one to have some alien concern come into his life and torment him with more anxiety than any affair of his own.  This is, perhaps, a hint from the infinite sympathy which feels for us all that none of us can hope to free himself from the troubles of others, that we are each bound to each by ties which, for the most part, we cannot perceive, but which, at the moment their stress comes, we cannot break.

Mrs. Brinkley lay awake and raged impotently against her complicity with the unhappiness of that distasteful girl and her more than distasteful mother.  In her revolt against it she renounced the interest she had felt in that silly boy, and his ridiculous love business, so really unimportant to her whatever turn it took.  She asked herself what it mattered to her whether those children marred their lives one way or another way.  There was a lurid moment before she slept when she wished Brinkley to go down and recall her telegram; but he refused to be a fool at so much inconvenience to himself.

Mrs. Brinkley came to breakfast feeling so much more haggard than she found either of the Pasmers looking, that she was able to throw off her lingering remorse for having told Mavering not to come.  She had the advantage also of doubt as to her precise motive in having done so; she had either done so because she had judged it best for him not to see Miss Pasmer again, or else she had done so to relieve the girl from the pain of an encounter which her mother evidently dreaded for her.  If one motive seemed at moments outrageously meddling and presumptuous, the other was so nobly good and kind that it more than counterbalanced it in Mrs. Brinkley’s mind, who knew very well in spite of her doubt that she had, acted from a mixture of both.  With this conviction, it was both a comfort and a pang to find by the register of the hotel, which she furtively consulted, that Dan had not arrived by the morning boat, as she groundlessly feared and hoped he might have done.

In any case, however, and at the end of all the ends, she had that girl on her hands more than ever; and believing as she did that Dan and Alice had only to meet in order to be reconciled, she felt that the girl whom she had balked of her prey was her innocent victim.  What right had she to interfere?  Was he not her natural prey?  If he liked being a prey, who was lawfully to forbid him?  He was not perfect; he would know how to take care of himself probably; in marriage things equalised themselves.  She looked at the girl’s thin cheeks and lack-lustre eyes, and pitied and hated her with that strange mixture of feeling which our victims aspire in us.

She walked out on the verandah with the Pasmers after breakfast, and chatted a while about indifferent things; and Alice made an effort to ignore the event of the night before with a pathos which wrung Mrs. Brinkley’s heart, and with a gay resolution which ought to have been a great pleasure to such a veteran dissembler as her mother.  She said she had never found the air so delicious; she really believed it would begin to do her good now; but it was a little fresh just there, and with her eyes she invited her mother to come with her round the corner into that sheltered recess, and invited Mrs. Brinkley not to come.