ll be walking just like any
one else in no time!" And in the same tone she said to Barbara: "I know
my darling girl is going to that luncheon, and going to forget that her
hat isn't quite the thing for the occasion," and said to little
Constance, "We're going to forget that it's raining, and not think about
dismal things any more!" No account of flood or fire or outrage was
great enough to win from her more than a rueful smile, a sigh, and a
brisk: "Well, I suppose such things _must_ be, or they wouldn't be
permitted. Don't let's think about it!"

Women who knew Mrs. Toland spoke of her as "wonderful." And indeed she
was wonderful in many ways, a splendid manager, a delightful hostess,
and essentially motherly and domestic in type. She was always happy and
always busy, gathering violets, chaperoning Sally or Barbara at the
dentist's, selecting plaids for the "girlies'" winter suits. Her married
life--all her life, in fact--had been singularly free from clouds, and
she expected the future to be even brighter, when "splendid, honourable
men" should claim her girls, one by one, and all the remembered romance
of her youth begin again. That the men would be forthcoming she did not
doubt; had not Fate already delivered Jim Studdiford into her hands for
Barbara?

James Studdiford, who had just now finished his course at medical
college, was affectionately known to the young Tolands as "Jim," and
stood to them in a relationship peculiarly pleasing to Mrs. Toland. He
was like a brother, and yet, actually, he bore not the faintest real
kinship to--well, to Barbara, for instance. Years before, twenty years
before, to be exact, Doctor Toland, then unmarried, and unacquainted, as
it happened, with the lovely Miss Sally Ford, had been engaged to a
beautiful young widow, a Mrs. Studdiford, who had been left with a large
fortune and a tiny boy some two years before. This was in Honolulu,
where people did a great deal of riding in those days, and it presently
befell that the doctor, two weeks before the day that had been set for
the wedding, found himself kneeling beside his lovely fiancee on a rocky
headland, as she lay broken and gasping where her horse had flung her,
and straining to catch the last few agonized words she would ever say:

"You'll--keep Jim--with you, Robert?"

How Doctor Toland brought the small boy to San Francisco, how he met the
dashing and indifferent Sally, and how she came at last to console him
for his loss