He is downstairs now in the smoking room, impatiently humoring this
lifelong habit of mine to have one hour of the day all to myself.

My mother taught me this when I was a tiny girl. My "thinking hour,"
she called it, a time when I solved my small problems or pondered my
baby sins. All my life I have kept up the practice. And now I am going
to devote it to another request of the little mother who went away
from me forever last year.

"Margaret, darling," she said to me on the last day we ever talked
together, "some time you are going to marry--you do not think so now,
but you will--and how I wish I had time to warn you of all the hidden
rocks in your course! If I only had kept a record of those days of my
own unhappiness, you might learn to avoid the wretchedness that was
mine. Promise me that if you marry you will write down the problems
that confront you and your solution of them, so than when your own
baby girl comes to you and grows into womanhood she may be helped by
your experience."

Poor little mother! Her marriage with my father had been one of those
wretched tragedies, the knowledge of which frightens so many people
away from the altar. I have no memory of my father. I do not know
today whether he be living or dead. When I was 4 years old he ran away
with the woman who had been my mother's most intimate friend. All my
life has been warped by the knowledge. Even now, worshipping Dicky as
I do, I am wondering as I sit here, obeying my mother's last request,
whether or not an experience like hers will come to me.

A fine augury for our happiness when such thoughts as this can come to