: that it is worth
so much and no more. She had known the anguish of watching the man she
loved discover this first, and of reading the discovery in his eyes. It
was a part of her history that she had not trusted herself to think
of for a long time past: she always took a big turn about that haunted
corner. But now, at the sight of the young man downstairs, so openly and
jovially Leila's, she was overwhelmed at the senseless waste of her own
adventure, and wrung with the irony of perceiving that the success
or failure of the deepest human experiences may hang on a matter of
chronology.

Then gradually the thought of Ide returned to her. "I chose to think
that our case wasn't closed," he had said. She had been deeply touched
by that. To every one else her case had been closed so long! _Finis_ was
scrawled all over her. But here was one man who had believed and waited,
and what if what he believed in and waited for were coming true? If
Leila's "all right" should really foreshadow hers?

As yet, of course, it was impossible to tell. She had fancied, indeed,
when she entered the drawing-room before luncheon, that a too-sudden
hush had fallen on the assembled group of Leila's friends, on the
slender vociferous young women and the lounging golf-stockinged young
men. They had all received her politely, with the kind of petrified
politeness that may be either a tribute to age or a protest at laxity;
but to them, of course, she must be an old woman because she was Leila's
mother, and in a society so dominated by youth the mere presence of
maturity was a constraint.

One of the young girls, however, had presently emerged from the group,
and, attaching herself to Mrs. Lidcote, had listened to her with a
blue gaze of admiration which gave the older woman a sudden happy
consciousness of her long-forgotten social graces. It was agreeable to
find herself attracting this young Charlotte Wynn, whose mother had been
among her closest friends, and in whom something of the soberness and
softness of the earlier manners had survived. But the little colloquy,
broken up by the announcement of luncheon, could of course result in
nothing more definite than this reminiscent emotion.

No, she could not yet tell how her own case was to be fitted into the
new order of things; but there were more people--"older people" Leila
had put it--arriving by the afternoon train, and that evening at dinner
she would doubtless be able to judge. She began to