ing recoil had been well-grounded. Diantha, deadly pale
and yet with little flickering, unsteady smiles, Diantha, quiet and
self-possessed, with nothing but those white cheeks to show how flesh
and spirit shrank from the approaching ordeal, was terrifyingly a
stranger. But that she was a woman there could be no doubt. And this
woman, soon to be a mother, was her child.

The little, bare, remote room seemed a refuge. Annabel closed the door
and would have locked it, but the key was missing. She sank into the
single chair, her face storm-swept, transformed by her emotion almost
beyond recognition. The natural assumption would have been that she
was enduring vicariously the suffering of her daughter, bearing for the
second time the pangs that had given Diantha life. As a matter of
fact, Diantha's pain and peril were remote from her mood. Her mind had
room for one thought: "Hast thou found me, O mine enemy!"

As she stared before her, hand gripping hand, her bloodless lips moving
inarticulately, she saw the monstrous folly of her self-deception. She
had played at youth, listened to the love-making of undeveloped boys
whose mother she might have been, and made herself believe that she
could cheat Time. And Time, too, had had his fun. For the moment it
almost seemed to her that her girlish prettiness had been his merciless
concession to add to the spirit of the game, as a cat lets a mouse run
with a sense of recovered freedom, only to pounce again.

And now she was to be a grandmother. She made a futile effort to face
the thought, to adjust her idea of herself to so astounding a
development. But it was like the effort to imagine herself belonging
to another race, Ethiopian or Oriental. It was unthinkable. She had a
clearly defined conception of grandmothers, persons with a generous
waist-line and white hair. Undoubtedly they were useful people in
their way, and worthy of regard. But she found it impossible to
realize that she herself might belong to their number.

As if recalling some experience far distant, she fell to reviewing the
events of the previous evening. Her caller had been a young fellow
with a carefully nurtured and on the whole a promising mustache and
with a lurid taste in socks. She had enjoyed the call. The boy's
crude efforts at veiled sentiment, his languishing glances had been
incense to her vanity. But to-morrow! "How is your little grandchild,
Mrs. Sinclair?" he would say. Or no