ped with a little cry
of dismay, "Let her! ... I'm forgetting that it's no longer in my power
to say what she's to do or not to do!"

"How's that?"

"She's no longer the young, big-eyed, watchful child who startled us by
saying uncanny things. She's no longer the slip of a thing that I left
with her grandparents, with her wistful eyes on the horizon. She's a
married woman, Geordie, with a house of her own, and it isn't for me to
'let' her do anything or tell her or even ask her. She can do what she
likes now. I've lost her, Geordie."

"Why, how's that, Lil?" There was surprise as well as sympathy in
Harley's voice. He had only known other people's children.

She went on quickly, with a queer touch of emotion. "The inevitable
change has come before I've had time to realize it. It's a shock. It
takes my breath away. I feel as if I had been set adrift from an
anchor. Instead of being my little girl she's my daughter now. I'm no
longer 'mammy.' I'm mother. Isn't it,--isn't it wonderful? It's like
standing under a mountain that's always seemed to be a little hill
miles and miles away. From now on I shall be the one to be told to do
things, I shall be the child to be kept in order. It's a queer moment
in the life of a mother, Geordie."

She laughed, but she didn't catch her tears before they were halfway
down her cheeks. "I'm an old lady, my dear."

Harley gave one of his hearty, incredulous laughs. "You, old. You're
one of the everlasting young ones, you are, Lil," and he stood and
beamed with love and admiration.

"But I've got you, Geordie," she added, and her surprised heart that
had suddenly felt so empty warmed again and was soothed when he took
her hand eagerly and pressed it to his lips.

Grandfather and Grandmother Ludlow, Joan and many others who had formed
the habit of believing that Christopher Ludlow's widow would remain
true to his memory, failed utterly to understand the reason for her
sudden breakaway from a settled and steady routine, to plunge into
belated matrimony with a self-made man of fifty-five who seemed to them
to be not only devoid of all attractiveness but bourgeois and rather
ridiculous. But why? A little sympathy, a little knowledge of human
nature,--that's all that was necessary to make this romance
understandable. Because it was romance, in the best sense of that much
abused word. It was not the romance defined in the dictionary as an
action or adventure of an unusual or wonderful cha