ation has been conducted along those
lines by an old gentleman who believes that the southern gentlewoman
must be the absolute head of her home.

About this time there enters her little world a woman whose every
impulse stands for motherhood at its sweetest and best, and who has
helped all that is best and truest in the young girl to develop, guiding
her by the beautiful power of affection. All has been peace and harmony,
and Peggy is rapidly qualifying in ability to assume absolute control in
her father's home.

Then, with scarcely a moment's warning, there is dropped into her home
and daily life a person with whom she cannot have anything in common,
from whom she intuitively shrinks and cannot trust.

Under such circumstances the present climax is not surprising.

Peggy's whole life had in some respects been a contradiction and a cry
for a girl's natural heritage--a mother's all-comprehending love. The
love that does not wait to be told of the loved one's needs and
happiness, but which lives only to foresee what is best for her and to
bring it to pass, never mind at what sacrifice to self. Peggy had missed
_that_ love in her life and not all the other forms combined had
compensated.

Until the previous year she had never felt this; nor could she have put
it into words even at the present moment. She only knew that in Polly's
companionship she had been very, very happy and that she was terribly
lonely without her. That in Mrs. Harold she had found a friend whom she
had learned to love devotedly and trust implicitly, and that in the
brief time Mrs. Howland, Polly's mother, had been in Annapolis and at
New London, she had caught a glimpse of a little world before undreamed
of; a world peculiarly Polly's and her mother's and which no other human
being invaded. Mrs. Howland had just such a little world for each of her
daughters and for the son-in-law whom she loved so tenderly. It was a
world sacred to the individual who dwelt therein with her. There was a
common world in which all met in mutual interests, but she possessed the
peculiar power of holding for each of her children their own "inner
shrine" which was truly "The Holy of Holies."

Although Peggy had known and loved Mrs. Harold longest, there was
something in Mrs. Howland's gentle unobtrusive sweetness, in her hidden
strength, which drew Peggy as a magnet and for the first time in her
life she longed for the one thing denied her: such a love as Polly
claime