'Oh yes'--he said carelessly--'with a handsomeness that doesn't matter.'

She laughed.

'Wait till Aunt Pattie and I have dressed her and put her to rights.'

'Well, you can do most things no doubt--both with bad books, and raw
girls,'--he said, with a shrug and a sigh.

They bade each other good-night, and Mrs. Burgoyne disappeared through the
glass door behind them.

* * * * *

The moon was sailing gloriously above the stone-pines of the garden. Mrs.
Burgoyne, half-undressed, sat dreaming in a corner room, with a high
painted ceiling, and both its windows open to the night.

She had entered her room in a glow of something which had been half
torment, half happiness. Now, after an hour's dreaming, she suddenly bent
forward and, parting the cloud of fair hair that fell about her, she
looked in the glass before her, at the worn, delicate face haloed within
it--thinking all the time with a vague misery of Lucy Foster's untouched
bloom.

Then her eyes fell upon two photographs that stood upon her table. One
represented a man in yeomanry uniform; the other a tottering child of two.

'Oh! my boy--my darling!'--she cried in a stifled agony, and snatching up
the picture, she bowed her head upon it, kissing it. The touch of it calmed