he said very quietly. Yet somehow Sara knew that she
meant to have an answer to her question.

"Why--why----" she stammered a little. "Isn't that enough?"--trying to
speak lightly.

Elisabeth shook her head.

"Tim wants more than a playfellow. Can't you give him what he wants,
Sara?"

Sara was silent a moment.

"I didn't know he had told you," she said, at last, rather lamely.

"Nor has he. Tim is loyal to the core. But a mother doesn't need telling
these things." Elisabeth's beautiful voice deepened. "Tim is bone of
my bone and flesh of my flesh--and he's soul of my soul as well. Do you
think, then, that I shouldn't know when he is hurt?"

Sara was strangely moved. There was something impressive in the
restrained passion of Elisabeth's speech, a certain primitive grandeur
in her envisagement of the relationship of mother and son.

"I expect," pursued Elisabeth calmly, "that you think I'm going too
far--farther than I have any right to. But it's any mother's right to
fight for her son's happiness, and I'm fighting for Tim's. Why won't you
marry him, Sara?" The question flashed out suddenly.

"Because--why--oh, because I'm not in love with him."

A gleam of rather sardonic mirth showed in Elisabeth's face.

"I wish," she observed, "that we lived in the good old days when you
could have been carried off by sheer force and _compelled_ to marry
him."

Sara laughed outright.

"I really believe you mean it!" she said with some amusement.

Elisabeth nodded.

"I do. I shouldn't have hesitated."

"And what about me? You wouldn't have considered my feelings at all
in the matter, I suppose?" Sara was still smiling, yet she had a dim
consciousness that, preposterous as it sounded, Elisabeth would have had
no scruples whatever about putting such a plan into effect had it been
in any way feasible.

"No." Elisabeth replied with the utmost composure. "Tim comes first.
But"--and suddenly her voice melted to an indescribable sweetness--"You
would be almost one with him in my heart, because you had brought him
happiness." She paused, then launched her question with a delicate
hesitancy that skillfully concealed all semblance of the probe. "Tell
me--is there any one else who has asked of you what Tim asks? Perhaps I
have come too late with my plea?"

Sara shook her head.

"No," she said flatly, "there is no one else." With a sudden bitter
self-mockery she added: "Tim's is the only proposal of marriage I have
to my