too happy to speak. "Now, you'll want to go home, of course,"
Godmother went on, "and so we'll agree on a sailing date and then you
may fly back to mother as soon as you wish, and stay till it's time to
go abroad."

They decided to sail the first of May; so Mary Alice went home almost
immediately, and on an evening late in March got off the train on to
that familiar platform whence she had so fearfully set forth only four
short months ago.

Father was at the station to meet her; and at home, by the soft-coal
fire burning beneath the white marble mantel in the sitting-room,
Mother was sewing and waiting for her.

Mary Alice was thinking, as she and Father neared the house, of that
miserable evening in the fall when she had stolen past her mother and
gone up to her room and wept passionately, in the dark, because life
had no enchantment for her. There would be no stealing past dear
Mother now! For the Secret was for Mother, too--yes, very much indeed
for Mother, as Mary Alice and Godmother had agreed in their wonderful
"tucking in" talk the night before Mary Alice came away. All the way
home, on the train, she had hardly been able to wait till she got to
Mother with this beautiful new thing in her heart.

Perhaps Mother had dreaded her girl's home-coming, in a way, almost as
much as she yearned for it. But if she had, Mary Alice never knew it;
and if she had, Mother herself soon forgot it. For in all the twenty
years of Mary Alice's life, her mother had never, it seemed, had so
much of her girl as in the month that followed her home-coming. Hour
after hour they worked about the house or sat before that grate fire in