the unchanged sitting-room, and talked and talked and talked. Mary
Alice told every little detail of those four months until her mother
lived them over with her and the light and life of them animated her as
they had animated Mary Alice.

Little by little, in that month, Mary Alice came at least to the
beginning of a wonderful new understanding: came to see how
parents--and _god_parents!--cease to have any particular future of
their own and live in the futures of the young things they love. Mary
Alice's bleak years had been bitter for her mother, too; perhaps
bitterer than for her. And her new enchantment with life was like new
blood in her mother's veins.

Mother cried when Mary Alice told her the Secret. "Oh, it's true! it's
true!" she said. "If only everybody could know it, what a different
world this would be!"

And as for the--Other! When Mary Alice told her mother about him and
what his coming into her life and his going out of it had meant, Mother
just held her girl close and could not speak.

The precious month flew by on wings as of the wind. Mary Alice was
"the town wonder," as her brother Johnny said, and she enjoyed that as
only a girl who has been the town wall-flower can; but after all,
everything was as nothing compared with Mother and the exultation that
had so evidently come into her life because out of her love and pain
and sacrifice a soul had come into the world to draw so richly from the
treasures of other hearts and to give so richly back again. There is
no triumph like it, as Mary Alice would perhaps know, some day. A
mother's purest happiness is very like God's own.