ek."

"It is easy, at all events, to ensure her an invitation to it; ask
Beatrice Miller to get her one."

"Oh, yes; that is easy enough. Oh, dear me, Maurice, you always manage to
get your own way with me; but you have given me a dreadfully hard task
this time."

"As if a woman of your known tact and _savoir faire_ was not capable of
any hard and impossible task!" answered her son, smiling, as he bent and
kissed her soft white face.

The gentle flattery pleased her. The old lady sat smiling happily to
herself, with her hands idle before her, for some minutes after he had
left her.

How dear he was to her, how good, how upright, how thoroughly generous
too, and unselfish to think so much of his brother's troubles just now,
in the midst of all his own happiness.

She got up and went to the window, and watched him as he strolled across
the garden to join the ladies, smiling and kissing her hand to him when
he looked back and saw her.

"Dear fellow, I hope he will be happy!" she said to herself, turning away
with a half sigh. And then suddenly something brought back the ball at
Shadonake to her recollection. There flashed back into her memory a
certain scene in a cool, dimly-lit conservatory: two people whispering
together under a high-swung Chinese lamp, and a background of dark-leaved
shrubs behind them.

She had been puzzled that night. There had been something going on that
she had not quite understood. And now again that feeling of unsatisfied
comprehension came back to her. For the first time it struck her
painfully that the son whom she idolized so much--whose life and
character had been her one study and her one delight ever since the day
of his birth--was nevertheless a riddle to her. That the secret of his
inner self was as much hidden from her--his mother--as though she had
been the merest stranger; that the life she had striven so closely to
entwine with her own was nothing after all but a separate existence, in
the story of whose soul she herself had no part. He was a man struggling
single-handed in all the heat and turmoil of the battle of life, and she,
nothing but a poor, weak old woman, standing feebly aside, powerless to
help or even to understand the creature to whom she had given birth.

There fell a tear or two down upon her wrinkled little hands as she
thought of it. She could not understand him; there was something in his
life she could not fathom. Oh, what did it all mean?

Alas, sooner