like standing under a mountain that's always seemed to be a little
hill miles and miles away. From now on I shall be the one to be told
to do things, I shall be the child to be kept in order. It's a queer
moment in the life of a mother, Geordie."

She laughed, but she didn't catch her tears before they were halfway
down her cheeks. "I'm an old lady, my dear."

Harley gave one of his hearty, incredulous laughs. "You, old. You're
one of the everlasting young ones, you are, Lil," and he stood and
beamed with love and admiration.

"But I've got you, Geordie," she added, and her surprised heart that
had suddenly felt so empty warmed again and was soothed when he took
her hand eagerly and pressed it to his lips.

Grandfather and Grandmother Ludlow, Joan and many others who had
formed the habit of believing that Christopher Ludlow's widow would
remain true to his memory, failed utterly to understand the reason
for her sudden breakaway from a settled and steady routine, to
plunge into belated matrimony with a self-made man of fifty-five who
seemed to them to be not only devoid of all attractiveness but
bourgeois and rather ridiculous. But why? A little sympathy, a
little knowledge of human nature,--that's all that was necessary to
make this romance understandable. Because it was romance, in the
best sense of that much abused word. It was not the romance defined
in the dictionary as an action or adventure of an unusual or
wonderful character, soaring beyond the limits of fact and real life
and often of probability, but the result of loneliness and middle
age, and of two hearts starving for love and the expression of love,