. If I'm not mistaken, Philip thinks so too."

"Well, why shouldn't he? That's nothing to be solemn about."

The other smiled an enigmatical smile.

"Stop looking like that horrid Mona Lisa. You mean--" Jacqueline stared,
then shouted with laughter. "Blossom, you're _too_ silly! Of course
mother's the most beautiful person in the world, but after all she
is--mother! She's old."

"Remember Henry Esmond."

"Pooh! That's in a novel. Why, Philip might as well get up a romantic
passion for--for the Sistine Madonna."

"Which would be exactly like him," commented Jemima; but Jacqueline
dismissed the absurdity from her mind with another laugh.

From day to day now, Kate put off the breaking of her news. "Not yet,"
she pleaded with her better judgment. "I will wait till everything is
settled."

She waited a day too long.

Jemima had driven down to the crossroads store for some pressing
necessity of the sewing-room. Like many country stores, it combined the
sale of groceries, fishing-tackle, hardware, dry-goods, and other
commodities with the sale of wet-goods, the latter being confined to the
rear portion of the establishment, opening upon a different road from
the front portion.

The proprietor's wife, who usually managed the dry-goods and groceries'
section, happened to be absent at the time, and the proprietor's
unaccustomed efforts to find the buttons Jemima needed aroused her quick
impatience.

"Never mind--let me find them myself, Mr. Tibbits," she urged. "I'll put
them down in your book. There's a customer in the back store. Do go and
attend to him."

Tibbits meekly obeyed, murmuring, "You might find them buttons on the
shelf with the canned goods, or then agin they might be under the
counter behind them bolts of mosquito-bar."

So it happened that Jemima was on her knees behind the counter, quite
invisible, when two women in sunbonnets entered, deep in a congenial
discussion of their betters, such as might have been heard in a dozen
homes in the vicinity that day. They had failed to recognize the buggy
at the door as a Storm equipage.

"What I want to know is how's she ever goin' to manage with the two of
them at once. They do say the young parson's sort of took his father's
place with her."

"Laws! I should think she'd be ashamed. Her old enough to be his
mother!"

"No, she ain't, either. She wa'n't twenty, nothin' like, when Mr.
Kildare brought her here, and the French doctor's boy must a-been abo