has a
good deal of pull--"

"Horace's uncle? You mean Wilbour's, I suppose," Mrs. Lidcote
interjected, with a gasp of which a fraction was given to Miss Suffern's
flippant use of the language.

"Wilbour's? No, I don't. I mean Horace's. There's no bad feeling between
them, I assure you. Since Horace's engagement was announced--you didn't
know Horace was engaged? Why, he's marrying one of Bishop Thorbury's
girls: the red-haired one who wrote the novel that every one's talking
about, 'This Flesh of Mine.' They're to be married in the cathedral. Of
course Horace _can_, because it was Leila who--but, as I say, there's
not the _least_ feeling, and Horace wrote himself to his uncle about
Wilbour."

Mrs. Lidcote's thoughts fled back to what she had said to Ide the day
before on the deck of the _Utopia_. "I didn't take up much room before,
but now where is there a corner for me?" Where indeed in this crowded,
topsy-turvey world, with its headlong changes and helter-skelter
readjustments, its new tolerances and indifferences and accommodations,
was there room for a character fashioned by slower sterner processes and
a life broken under their inexorable pressure? And then, in a flash,
she viewed the chaos from a new angle, and order seemed to move upon the
void. If the old processes were changed, her case was changed with them;
she, too, was a part of the general readjustment, a tiny fragment of the
new pattern worked out in bolder freer harmonies. Since her daughter had
no penalty to pay, was not she herself released by the same stroke? The
rich arrears of youth and joy were gone; but was there not time enough
left to accumulate new stores of happiness? That, of course, was what
Franklin Ide had felt and had meant her to feel. He had seen at once
what the change in her daughter's situation would make in her view of
her own. It was almost--wondrously enough!--as if Leila's folly had been
the means of vindicating hers.

*****

Everything else for the moment faded for Mrs. Lidcote in the glow of her
daughter's embrace. It was unnatural, it was almost terrifying, to find
herself standing on a strange threshold, under an unknown roof, in a big
hall full of pictures, flowers, firelight, and hurrying servants, and
in this spacious unfamiliar confusion to discover Leila, bareheaded,
laughing, authoritative, with a strange young man jovially echoing her
welcome and transmitting her orders; but once Mrs. Lidcote had her child
on her