and planned her wedding with
a practical wisdom which had awed and saddened her mother. All the
wistful sentiments, the tender evasions, the consecrated dreams that had
gone into the preparations for Virginia's marriage, were buried
somewhere under the fragrant past of the eighties--and the memory of
them made her feel not forty-five, but a hundred. Yet the thing that
troubled her most was a feeling that she was in the power of forces
which she did not understand--a sense that there were profound
disturbances beneath the familiar surface of life.

When Lucy had gone out, with her dress open down the back and a glimpse
of her smooth girlish shoulders showing between the fastenings, Virginia
went over to the window again, and was rewarded by the sight of Harry's
athletic figure crossing the street.

In a minute he came in, kissing her with the careless tenderness which
was one of her secret joys.

"Halloo! little mother! All alone? Where are the others?" He was the
only one of her children who appeared to enjoy her, and sometimes when
they were alone together, he would turn and put his arms about her, or
stroke her hands with an impulsive, protecting sympathy. There were
moments when it seemed to her that he pitied her because the world had
moved on without her; and others when he came to her for counsel about
things of which she was not only ignorant, but even a little afraid.
Once he had consulted her as to whether he should go on the football
team at his college, and had listened respectfully enough to her timid
objections. Respect, indeed, was the quality in which he had never
failed her, and this, even more than his affection, had become a balm to
her in recent years, when Lucy and Jenny occasionally lost patience and
showed themselves openly amused by her old-fashioned opinions. She had
never forgotten that he had once taken her part when the girls had tried
to persuade her to brush back the little curls from her temples and wear
her hair in a pompadour.

"It would look so much more suitable for a woman of your age, mother
dear," Lucy had remarked sweetly with a condescending deference which
had made Virginia feel as if she were a thousand.

"And it would be more becoming, too, now that your hair is turning
grey," Jenny had added, with an intention to be kind and helpful which
had gone wrong somehow and turned into officiousness.

"Shut up, and don't be silly geese," Harry had growled at them, and his
rudene