'Mr. Gillespie and I have been talking it over all day, Dick,' Maud said very decidedly; 'and we're both of us of opinion—most distinctly of opinion—that you oughtn't, as a duty to mother and to us, to do anything that'll compel you to take back again the one great forward step you took in coming to Oxford. Mr. Gillespie says rightly, it's easy enough to go down, but not by any means so easy, once you're there, to climb up again.'
'I ought to do whatever makes me earn an immediate income soonest, though, for all your sakes, Maud,' Dick objected stoutly.
'Not at all!' Maud answered with Plantagenet decision, and with wisdom above her years, dictated no doubt by her love and pride in her brother. 'You oughtn't to sacrifice the future to the present.' Then she turned to him quite sharply. 'Did you see Mary Tudor to-day?' she asked, regardless of Gillespie's presence, for she considered him already as an old friend of the family.
The tell-tale colour rushed up fast into Dick's cheek.
'Yes, I did,' he answered, half faltering. 'And she behaved most nobly. She behaved as you'd expect such a girl to behave, Maud. She spoke of it quite beautifully.'
Maud drew back, triumphant. If Mary had been there, she could have thrown her thin arms round her neck and kissed her.
'Well, and she didn't advise you to go and settle at Chiddingwick!' Maud cried with proud confidence.
'She didn't exactly advise me,' Dick answered with some little hesitation; 'but she acquiesced in my doing it; and she said, whatever I did, she'd always love me equally. In point of fact,' Dick added, somewhat sheepishly, 'we never were engaged at all before to-day; but this morning we settled it.'
Maud showed her profound disappointment, nay, almost her contempt, in her speaking face. To say the truth, it's seldom we can any of us see anything both from our own point of view and someone else's as well. Maud could see nothing in all this but profound degradation for Dick, and indirectly for the family, if Dick went back to Chiddingwick; while Mary had only thought how noble and devoted it was of her unselfish lover to give up everything so readily for his mother and sisters.
'I think,' Dick ventured to put in, since Mary's reputation was at stake in Maud's mind, 'she was most—well, pleased that I should be willing to—to make this sacrifice—if I may call it so—because I thought it my duty.'