e he found her installed in the utmost
dignity of expectant maternity. Like many other people he had been a
little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a common human
experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a rare and
sacramental function. Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey,
dove-like tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had given way to
a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, her brisk little neck that had
always reminded him of the stalk of a flower was now softened and
rounded; her eyes were tender, and she moved about the place in the
manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the
scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and
a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic,
half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled
immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside
he found--it had been put there for him by Amanda--among much
other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all
philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.

Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the impending
fact. An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in
the depths of London society, but to make up for his absence Mrs. Morris
had taken a little cottage down by the river and the Wilder girls were
with her, both afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it seemed,
and more particularly Betty, prepared to be keenly critical of Benham's
attitude.

He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had
returned in a rather different vein of exaltation.

In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments an
effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed. It was as if she
put aside for him something official, something sincerely maintained,
necessary, but at times a little irksome. It was as if she was glad to
take him into her confidence and unbend. Within the pre-natal Amanda an
impish Amanda still lingered.

There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must never
know....

But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most unpontifical
moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him
home across Europe. At times she was extraordinarily jolly. They had two
or three happy walks about the Chexington woods; that year the golden
weather of October had flowed over into November, and