e out of the house within an hour. Once she was
gone, it would be easier to bring Owen to the point of understanding
that the break was final; if necessary, to work upon the girl to make
him see it. But that, Anna was sure, would not be necessary. It was
clear that Sophy Viner was leaving Givre with no thought of ever seeing
it again...

Suddenly, as she tried to put some order in her thoughts, she heard
Owen's call at the door: "Mother!----" a name he seldom gave her. There
was a new note in his voice: the note of a joyous impatience. It made
her turn hastily to the glass to see what face she was about to show
him; but before she had had time to compose it he was in the room and
she was caught in a school-boy hug.

"It's all right! It's all right! And it's all your doing! I want to
do the worst kind of penance--bell and candle and the rest. I've been
through it with HER, and now she hands me on to you, and you're to call
me any names you please." He freed her with his happy laugh. "I'm to be
stood in the corner till next week, and then I'm to go up to see her.
And she says I owe it all to you!"

"To me?" It was the first phrase she found to clutch at as she tried to
steady herself in the eddies of his joy.

"Yes: you were so patient, and so dear to her; and you saw at once what
a damned ass I'd been!" She tried a smile, and it seemed to pass muster
with him, for he sent it back in a broad beam. "That's not so difficult
to see? No, I admit it doesn't take a microscope. But you were so wise
and wonderful--you always are. I've been mad these last days, simply
mad--you and she might well have washed your hands of me! And instead,
it's all right--all right!"

She drew back a little, trying to keep the smile on her lips and not
let him get the least glimpse of what it hid. Now if ever, indeed, it
behoved her to be wise and wonderful!

"I'm so glad, dear; so glad. If only you'll always feel like that about
me..." She stopped, hardly knowing what she said, and aghast at the
idea that her own hands should have retied the knot she imagined to be
broken. But she saw he had something more to say; something hard to get
out, but absolutely necessary to express. He caught her hands, pulled
her close, and, with his forehead drawn into its whimsical smiling
wrinkles, "Look here," he cried, "if Darrow wants to call me a damned
ass too you're not to stop him!"

It brought her back to a sharper sense of her central peril: of the