When she was giving them their breakfast that morning her mind was fully made up.

She had had the night to lie awake upon it, to think it over, and to realise all that George had told her.

It had come to her as quite a new thing that the man whom she worshipped, worshipped her too.
While she believed that nobody else loved her;--when she could tell herself that her fate was nothing to anybody;--as long as it had seemed to her that the world for her must be cold, and hard, and material;--so long could she reconcile to herself, after some painful, dubious fashion, the idea of being the wife either of Adrian Urmand, or of any other man.

Some kind of servitude was needful, and if her uncle was decided that she must be banished from his house, the kind of servitude which was proposed to her at Basle would do as well as another.

But when she had learned the truth,--a truth so unexpected,--then such servitude became impossible to her.