Rose had deliberately robbed her of treasure--Aunt Rose, who was
almost middle-aged! For a moment she despised that fair, handsome man
whose image had filled her mind for what seemed a long, long time;
then she felt pity for him who had no eyes for youth, yet she
remembered his look of arrested interest.

But steadying her thoughts and enjoying her dramatic bitterness, she
laughed. He had merely surprised her likeness to Aunt Rose and that
was all. Her dream was over. She had known it was a dream, but the
awakening was cruel; it was also intensely exciting. She did not
regret it; she had at least discovered something about Aunt Rose. She
had a lover. That look of his, that pleading movement of his hand,
were unmistakable; he was a lover, and perhaps she, Henrietta Mallett,
alone knew the truth. She had suspected a secret, now she knew it; and
she had a sense of power, she had a weapon. She imagined herself
standing over Aunt Rose, armed with knowledge, no longer afraid; she
was involved in a romantic, perhaps a shameful, situation. Aunt Rose
was meeting a lover clandestinely in the woods while Aunt Caroline and
Aunt Sophia sat innocently at home, marvelling at Rose's indifference
to men, yet rejoicing in her spinsterhood; and Henrietta felt that
Rose had wronged her stepsisters almost as much as she had wronged her
niece. She was deceitful; that, in plain terms, accounted for what had
seemed a mysterious and conquered sorrow. It was Henrietta who was to
suffer, through the shattering of a dream.

She went home, walking quickly, but feeling that she groped in a fog,
broken here and there by lurid lights, the lights of knowledge and
determination. She was younger than Aunt Rose, she was as pretty, and
she was the daughter of Reginald Mallett who, though she did not know
it, had always wanted the things desired by other people. She could