ere and--we ought all to see her and make the matter public. We
can't do so too soon. It will seem as if we were ashamed if we don't."

"Yes, you are quite right, mother," said the young man gratefully, "and
I feel how kind and good you are. I have tried to consider you in this
matter, though I don't seem to have done so; I know what your rights
are, and I wish with all my heart that I were meeting even your tastes
perfectly. But I know you will like her when you come to know her.
It's been very hard for her every way--about her sister,--and she's
made a great sacrifice for me. She's acted nobly."

Mrs. Corey, whose thoughts cannot always be reported, said she was sure
of it, and that all she desired was her son's happiness.

"She's been very unwilling to consider it an engagement on that
account, and on account of Colonel Lapham's difficulties. I should
like to have you go, now, for that very reason. I don't know just how
serious the trouble is; but it isn't a time when we can seem
indifferent."

The logic of this was not perhaps so apparent to the glasses of fifty
as to the eyes of twenty-six; but Mrs. Corey, however she viewed it,
could not allow herself to blench before the son whom she had taught
that to want magnanimity was to be less than gentlemanly. She
answered, with what composure she could, "I will take your sisters,"
and then she made some natural inquiries about Lapham's affairs. "Oh,
I hope it will come out all right," Corey said, with a lover's vague
smile, and left her. When his father came down, rubbing his long hands
together, and looking aloof from all the cares of the practical world,
in an artistic withdrawal, from which his eye ranged over the
breakfast-table before he sat down, Mrs. Corey told him what she and
their son had been saying.

He laughed, with a delicate impersonal appreciation of the predicament.
"Well, Anna, you can't say but if you ever were guilty of supposing
yourself porcelain, this is a just punishment of your arrogance. Here
you are bound by the very quality on which you've prided yourself to
behave well to a bit of earthenware who is apparently in danger of
losing the gilding that rendered her tolerable."

"We never cared for the money," said Mrs. Corey. "You know that."

"No; and now we can't seem to care for the loss of it. That would be
still worse. Either horn of the dilemma gores us. Well, we still have
the comfort we had in the beginning; we can't h