nd to take part in the
rite, Mrs. Pasmer was quite ready at this point to embrace him with
motherly tenderness. Her tough little heart was really in her throat
with sympathy when she made an errand for the photograph of an English
vicarage, which they had hired the summer of the year before, and she
sent Alice back with it alone.

It seemed so long since they had met that the change in Alice did not
strike him as strange or as too rapidly operated. They met with the
fervour natural after such a separation, and she did not so much assume
as resume possession of him. It was charming to have her do it, to have
her act as if they had always been engaged, to have her try to press
down the cowlick that started capriciously across his crown, and to
straighten his necktie, and then to drop beside him on the sofa; it
thrilled and awed him; and he silently worshipped the superior composure
which her sex has in such matters. Whatever was the provisional
interpretation which her father and mother pretended to put upon the
affair, she apparently had no reservations, and they talked of their
future as a thing assured. The Dark Ages, as they agreed to call the
period of despair for ever closed that morning, had matured their love
till now it was a rapture of pure trust. They talked as if nothing could
prevent its fulfilment, and they did not even affect to consider the
question of his family's liking it or not liking it. She said that she
thought his father was delightful, and he told her that his father had
taken the greatest fancy to her at the beginning, and knew that Dan was
in love with her. She asked him about his mother, and she said just what
he could have wished her to say about his mother's sufferings, and the
way she bore them. They talked about Alice's going to see her.

"Of course your father will bring your sisters to see me first."

"Is that the way?" he asked: "You may depend upon his doing the right
thing, whatever it is."

"Well, that's the right thing," she said. "I've thought it out; and that
reminds me of a duty of ours, Dan!"

"A duty?" he repeated, with a note of reluctance for its untimeliness.

"Yes. Can't you think what?"

"No; I didn't know there was a duty left in the world."

"It's full of them."

"Oh, don't say that, Alice!" He did not like this mood so well as that
of the morning, but his dislike was only a vague discomfort--nothing
formulated or distinct.

"Yes," she persisted; "and we must