"Come soon," she whispered. "It
will comfort the child just now to know that she is wanted."

Philip had taken the kiss with closed eyes. When he opened them again,
his room was empty. He ran to the window, and saw her, a shadow shape,
swing into her saddle with a shadowy wave of the hand for him. He stood
there watching her out of sight, so soon out of sight; his lady, the
woman he loved, so infinitely kind, and beautiful, and cruel, heedless
as the gods are of homage they do not need.

He groped his way back to the chair where she had sat, leaned his cheek
where hers had rested--the place was still warm--and said good-by to
her....

An hour later, before his courage had a chance to fail him, he rode to
Storm and asked Jacqueline to marry him.

The girl put up her lips simply as a child. "I'd love to marry you,
Phil, darling. How sweet of you to ask me! And now," she said eagerly,
"let's go and tell Mummy. She'll be so pleased!"

CHAPTER XLI

So there was presently another wedding at Storm, or rather in the church
at Storm; and Kate could have sung with the Psalmist: "Now lettest thou
thy servant depart in peace according to thy ways, for mine eyes have
seen thy salvation."

Jemima, who spent as much time as her husband would spare her at Storm,
in the interval between the formal engagement and the wedding, tried
conscientiously to summon up courage to end in some way a situation that
seemed to her impossible. But her hints and innuendoes, broad as she
dared make them, had no effect upon the radiant satisfaction of her
mother, nor upon Philip himself, hedged around as he was with a sort of
calm serenity, an uplifted, detached air, which she had not sufficient
experience to recognize as the elation that goes with martyrdom.

She began to wonder if after all she had been mistaken in Philip's
feeling for her mother. He seemed quite content, even happy.
Nevertheless, there was something about him that awed Jemima a little,
made her usual frankness with him quite impossible.

With Jacqueline, however, she had no such feeling of awe, and she
watched her sister with amazed impatience. Her infatuation for Channing
had been a thing inexplicable to the fastidious Jemima; even more
inexplicable was the ease with which she appeared to forget him for
another lover.

Much of the girl's gaiety had returned to her. She entered into the
wedding preparations with the eagerness of a child playing with a new
toy. She