more
than once attended her, a handsome woman of sixty with a body still firm
and white, her hair, faded now to a very pale primrose, in two thick
braids down her back, her eyes clear and calm. When the doctor arrived,
she was sitting up in her bed, knitting. He felt at once how glad she
was to see him, but he soon gathered that she had made no determination
to get well. She told him, indeed, that she could not very well get
along without Mr. Kronborg. The doctor looked at her with astonishment.
Was it possible that she could miss the foolish old man so much? He
reminded her of her children.

"Yes," she replied; "the children are all very well, but they are not
father. We were married young."

The doctor watched her wonderingly as she went on knitting, thinking how
much she looked like Thea. The difference was one of degree rather than
of kind. The daughter had a compelling enthusiasm, the mother had none.
But their framework, their foundation, was very much the same.

In a moment Mrs. Kronborg spoke again. "Have you heard anything from
Thea lately?"

During his talk with her, the doctor gathered that what Mrs. Kronborg
really wanted was to see her daughter Thea. Lying there day after day,
she wanted it calmly and continuously. He told her that, since she felt
so, he thought they might ask Thea to come home.

"I've thought a good deal about it," said Mrs. Kronborg slowly. "I hate
to interrupt her, now that she's begun to get advancement. I expect
she's seen some pretty hard times, though she was never one to complain.
Perhaps she'd feel that she would like to come. It would be hard, losing
both of us while she's off there."

When Dr. Archie got back to Denver he wrote a long letter to Thea,
explaining her mother's condition and how much she wished to see her,
and asking Thea to come, if only for a few weeks. Thea had repaid the
money she had borrowed from him, and he assured her that if she happened
to be short of funds for the journey, she had only to cable him.

A month later he got a frantic sort of reply from Thea. Complications in
the opera at Dresden had given her an unhoped-for opportunity to go on
in a big part. Before this letter reached the doctor, she would have
made her debut as ELIZABETH, in "Tannhauser." She wanted to go to her
mother more than she wanted anything else in the world, but, unless she
failed,--which she would not,--she absolutely could not leave Dresden
for six months. It was not that