Anna.

"No, my heart! Mother's just going to bed." And ten minutes later Julia
was asleep, her face as serene as the child's own.

The morning brought her only a shamed memory of the night before and its
moods, and as Richie was quite his natural self, Julia determined to
dismiss the matter as a passing moment of misinterpreted sentiment on
both their parts. To-day was a Sunday, so perfect that they had
breakfast on the porch, and in the afternoon took a long climb on the
mountainside, across patches of blossoming manzanita, and through
meadows sweet with the liquid note of rising larks. They came back in
the twilight: Anna limp and drowsy on Richard's shoulders, Miss Toland
admitting to fatigue, but all three ready to agree with Julia's estimate
that it had been a wonderful Sunday.

But night brought to two of them that new and strange self-consciousness
that each had been secretly dreading all day. Julia fought it as she
might have fought the oncoming of a physical ill, yet inexorably it
arrived. Supper was an ordeal, she found speech difficult, she could
hardly raise her eyes.

"Julie, you're as rosy as a little gipsy," said Miss Toland approvingly.
"Doesn't colour become her, Rich?"

"She looks fine," Richard muttered, almost inarticulately. Julia looked
up only long enough to give Miss Toland a pained and fluttering smile.
She was glad of an excuse to disappear with Anna, when the little girl's
bedtime arrived, and lingered so long in the bedroom that Miss Toland
came and rapped on the door.

"Julia! What _are_ you doing?" called the older woman impatiently. Julia
came to the door.

"Why, I'm so tired, Aunt Sanna," she began smilingly.

"Tired, nonsense!" Miss Toland said roundly. "Come sit on the porch with
Richie and me. It's like summer out of doors, and there'll be a moon!"

So Julia went to take her place on the porch steps, with a great curved
branch of the white rose arching over her head, and the fragrant stretch
of the grassy hilltop sloping away, at her feet, to the valley far
below. Miss Toland dozed, and the younger people talked a little, and
were silent for long spaces between the little casual sentences that
to-night seemed so full of meaning.

The next day Julia went home, to Miss Toland's disgust and to little
Anna's sorrow. Richie drove Julia and the little girl to the train;
there was no explanation needed between them; at parting they looked
straight into each other's eyes.

"Ask