wept, and a greater bitterness rose in her at the thought that it was not
for her dead father that the tears fell but in pure weak sympathy and
helplessness. She, herself, was the only lonely one. She alone, remembered.
She alone longed for him. In this sharpened realization of her own sorrow
she forgot that it had not been the actual cause of her grief.

"Poor darling; poor child," her mother said at last. "Imogen, I know that
I've failed, in so much. But I want so to make up for things, if I can; to
be near you; to fill the loneliness a little; to have you love me, too,
with time."

"Love you, my dear mother? Why, I am full of love for you. Haven't you felt
that?" Imogen drew herself away to look her grieved wonder into her
mother's eyes. "Oh, mama, how little you know me!"

Valerie, flushed, the tears on her cheeks, oddly shaken from her usual
serenity, still clasped her daughter's hands and still spoke on. "I know, I
know,--but it's not in the way it ought to be. It's not your fault, Imogen;
it's mine; it must be the mother's fault if she can't make herself needed.
Only you can't know how it all began, from so far back--that sense that you
didn't need me. But I shirked; I know that I shirked. Things seemed too
hard for me--I didn't know how to bear them. Perhaps you might have come
almost to hate me, if I had stayed, as things were. I'm not making any
appeal. I'm not trying to force anything. But I so want you to know how I
long to have my chance--to begin all over again. I so want you to help."

Imogen, troubled and confused by her mother's soft yet almost passionate
eagerness, that seemed to pull her down to some childish, inferior
place, just as her mother's arms had drawn down her head to an attitude
incongruous with its own benignant loftiness, had yet been able, while she