ng it, Austen Blair nodded; it was the first approval accorded her
for some time.

She laughed. "I go to-day," she repeated.

Her uncle, who had risen, put the paper, neatly folded, into his
wallet, then crossed to her and put out his hand.

"I will not see you again then?" he said, and shook hands.

A moment after she heard the front door close.

There were the servants to bid good-by, and that being done there was
no excuse to linger.

It was a warm May day; the magnolia in the yard, the pirus japonicas,
the calycanthus, the horse chestnuts, were in bloom. The lawn was
green, the edges of the gravel paths were newly cut and trim. Alexina,
in her muslin dress and Leghorn hat, turned on the stone flagging and
looked back at the home she was leaving. Home?

The girl, pausing in the yard of the big house, glanced across the
street to a shabby old brick cottage. Her affection was for it.

The hotel was in the business part of the city near the river. A
street-car would have taken her directly there but she walked, as if
seeking to put the moment off. The way took her past the house
furnished and waiting for Aunt Harriet and the Major. Louise was
sitting on an up-stairs window-sill with little Stevie, and caught his
small fist and waved it to her. A curtain was fluttering out an opened
window and a comfortable looking coloured woman was sweeping the
pavement. The place had an air of relaxation, of comfort, already.
Aunt Harriet was going to have a home.

The arrangements had been made at the hotel, and the child, for a very
child she was, went in at the ladies' entrance where a sleepy bell-boy
sat, always nodding, past the pillared corridor, on up-stairs, and
along the crimson-carpeted hallways. She was trembling, her throat was
dry.

In the suite she had taken, a bed-room either side opened into a
connecting parlour. It was the knob of the parlour door she turned
after a tap. Then she went in.

"Why, you tall, charming, baby-faced--! Celeste, Celeste, here's your
baby! Come here to me, Malise. Why the child's hands are cold!"

How foolish to have dreaded it so! It was all gone--even the
constraint. The twelve years were as nothing. She was again the baby
child, Malise, so-called by her mother's people.

And her mother? The linen pillows on the sofa beneath her head looked
cool and pleasantly rumpled, and the sheer white wrapper was fine and
softly laundered as a baby's. Her hair, hanging in two plaits over