emerged before the eyes that watched for her, she was smiling again at
something that Eddy had said to her. Then her eyes found them, Jack and
Imogen, so near now, sentinels before the old life, that her smile, her
aspect, her very loveliness, seemed to menace, and Jack felt that she
caught a new gravity from the stern gentleness of Imogen's gaze; that
she adjusted her features to meet it; that, with a little shock, she
recognized the traces of weeping on her daughter's face and saw, in his own
intentionally hardened look, that she had tuned herself to a wrong pitch
and had been, all unconsciously, jarring.

He couldn't but own that her readjustment, if readjustment it was, was very
beautifully done. Tears rose in her eyes, too. He saw, as she neared them,
that her face was pale and weary; it looked ever so gently, ever so sadly,
perhaps almost timidly, at her daughter, and as she came to them she put
out her hand to Imogen, laid hold on her and held her without speaking
while they all moved away together.

The tears of quick sympathy had risen to Jack's own eyes and he stood apart
while the mother and daughter kissed. After that, and when they had gone
on a little before him and Eddy, Mrs. Upton turned to him, and if she
readjusted herself she didn't, as it were, retract, for the smile again
rested on him while Eddy presented him to her. He saw then that she had
suffered, though with a suffering different from any that he would have
thought of as obvious. How or what she had suffered he could not tell, but
the pale, weary features, for all their smile, reassured him. She wasn't,
at all events, a heartless, a flippant woman.

Eddy and Mrs. Upton's maid remained behind to do battle with the
custom-house, and Jack, with Imogen and her mother, got into the capacious
cab that was waiting for them.