ly and discovered with relief that Pansy did
not once glance at her with uneasiness or for approval. The mother
looked at Dent with eyes growing dim. "She will never seem to be
the wife of my son," she said, "but she will make her children look
like his children."

And so it was all over and they were gone--slipped away through the
hiding white mists without a doubt of themselves, without a doubt
of each other, mating as naturally as the wild creatures who never
know the problems of human selection, or the problems that
civilization leaves to be settled after selection has been made.

Mrs. Meredith and Rowan and the clergyman were left with the father
and the children, and with an unexampled wedding collation--one of
Pansy's underived masterpieces. The clergyman frightened the
younger children; they had never seen his like either with respect
to his professional robes or his superhuman clerical voice--their
imaginations balancing unsteadily between the impossibility of his
being a man in a nightgown and the impossibility of his being a
woman with a mustache.

After his departure their fright and apprehensions settled on Mrs.
Meredith. They ranged themselves on chairs side by side against a
wall, and sat confronting her like a class in the public school
fated to be examined in deadly branches. None moved except when
she spoke, and then all writhed together but each in a different
way; the most comforting word from her produced a family spasm with
individual proclivities. Rowan tried to talk with the father
about crops: they were frankly embarrassed. What can a young man
with two thousand acres of the best land say to an old man with
fifty of the poorest?

The mother and son drove home in silence. She drew one of his
hands into her lap and held it with close pressure. They did not
look at each other.

As the carriage rolled easily over the curved driveway, through the
noble forest trees they caught glimpses of the house now standing
clear in afternoon sunshine. Each had the same thought of how
empty it waited there without Dent--henceforth less than a son, yet
how much more; more than brother, but how much less. How a brief
ceremony can bind separated lives and tear bound ones apart!

"Rowan," she said, as they walked slowly from the carriage to the
porch, she having clasped his arm more intimately, "there is
something I have wanted to do and have been trying to do for a long
time. It must not be put