tured face. Her
mother had been different from other women, too. This, forsooth, meant
to her what God meant to others. To this she strove to be true, and not
to hurt nor vex. And how little she really knew of her mother, and of
how much was conjecture and surmise, she was unaware; for it was through
many years she had erected this mother-myth.

Yet was it all myth? She resented the doubt with quick jealousy, and,
opening the bottom drawer of the chest, drew forth a battered portfolio.
Out rolled manuscripts, faded and worn, and arose a faint far scent of
sweet-kept age. The writing was delicate and curled, with the quaint
fineness of half a century before. She read a stanza to herself:

"Sweet as a wind-lute's airy strains Your gentle muse has learned to
sing, And California's boundless plains Prolong the soft notes echoing."

She wondered, for the thousandth time, what a windlute was; yet much
of beauty, much of beyondness, she sensed of this dimly remembered
beautiful mother of hers. She communed a while, then unrolled a second
manuscript. "To C. B.," it read. To Carlton Brown, she knew, to her
father, a love-poem from her mother. Saxon pondered the opening lines:

"I have stolen away from the crowd in the groves, Where the nude statues
stand, and the leaves point and shiver At ivy-crowned Bacchus, the Queen
of the Loves, Pandora and Psyche, struck voiceless forever."

This, too, was beyond her. But she breathed the beauty of it. Bacchus,
and Pandora and Psyche--talismans to conjure with! But alas! the
necromancy was her mother's. Strange, meaningless words that meant so
much! Her marvelous mother had known their meaning. Saxon spelled
the three words aloud, letter by letter, for she did not dare their
pronunciation; and in her consciousness glimmered august connotations,
profound and unthinkable. Her mind stumbled and halted on the
star-bright and dazzling boundaries of a world beyond her world in which
her mother had roamed at will. Again and again, solemnly, she went over
the four lines. They were radiance and light to the world, haunted with
phantoms of pain and unrest, in which she had her being. There, hidden
among those cryptic singing lines, was the clue. If she could only grasp
it, all would be made clear. Of this she was sublimely confident. She
would understand Sarah's sharp tongue, her unhappy brother, the cruelty
of Charley Long, the justness of the bookkeeper's beating, the day-long,
month-long, yea