's face when he was dying; he did
not know what was to become of me; he was quite weak, like a little
child, and he cried on my breast. And my mother's face when she died. I
have not told you anything of my mother."

"Will you? I want to hear everything about you; everything," said
Gregory.

"This is her locket," Karen said, putting her hand over it. "Her face is
in it; would you like to see it?"

He held out his hand, and slipping the ribbon over her head she pressed
the little spring and laid the open locket in it.

He saw the tinted photograph of a young girl's head, a girl younger than
Karen and with her fair hair and straight brows and square chin; but it
was a gentler face and a clumsier, and strange with its alien
nationality.

"I always feel as if she were my child and I her mother when I look at
that," said Karen. "It was taken before I was born. She had a happy
life, and yet my memory of her breaks my heart. She was so very young
and it frightened her so much to die; she could not bear to leave us."

Gregory, holding the little locket, looked at it silently. Then he put
it to his lips. "You care for me, don't you, Karen?" he said.

"You know, I think," said Karen, repeating her former words.

He laid the locket in her hand, and the moment had for him a sacramental
holiness so that the locket was like a wedding-ring; holding it and her
hand together he said, lifting his eyes to hers, "I love you. Do you
love me?"

Her eyes had filled with tears when he had kissed her mother's face, and
there was young awe in her gaze; but no shadow, no surprise.

"Yes," she said, unhesitatingly. "Yes, I love you, dear Gregory."

The simplicity, the inevitableness of his bliss overwhelmed him. He held
her hand and looked down at it. All about them was the blue. All her
past, its beauty, its dark, forgotten things, she had given to him. She
was his for ever. "Oh, my darling Karen," he murmured.

She bent down to look at him now, smiling and unclosing her hand from
his gently, so that she could look at her mother's face. "How glad she
would be if she could know," she said. "Perhaps she does know. Do you
not think so?"

"Dear--I don't know what I think about those hopes. I hope."

"Oh, it is more than hope, my belief that she is there; that she is not
lost. Only one cannot tell how or when or where it all may be. For that,
yes, it can be only hope. She, too, would love you, I am sure," Karen
continued.

"Would sh