r Tim at this moment was a study. All the flags of
triumph and joy were hung out in it and floated on the breeze; a
soul appeared at the two windows shining with perfect happiness;
and, mysteriously, in all the little figure, from the ruffled
primrose-colored feathers of hair to the feet in the white shoes, the
pride of manhood looked forth through the glowing rapture of a child.

"What a jolly boy!" said Dion to Jenkins, when Master Tim and his mother
had departed. "It must be good to have a boy like that."

"I hope you'll have one some day, sir," said Jenkins, speaking heartily
in his powerful voice, but looking, for the moment, unusually severe.

He and Bert, his wife, had had one child, a girl, which had died of
quinsy, and they had never had another.

"Now I'm ready for you, sir!" he added, with a sort of outburst of
recovery. "I should like a round with the gloves to-day, if it's all the
same to you."

It was all the same to Dion, and, when he reached Queen Anne's Mansions
in the darkness of evening, he was still glowing from the exercise; the
blood sang through his veins, and his heart was almost as light as his
step.

Marion, the parlor-maid, let him in, and told him his mother was at
home. Dion put his hand to his lips, stole across the hall noiselessly,
softly opened the drawing-room door, and caught his mother unawares.

Whenever he came into the well-known flat alone, he had a moment of
retrogression, went back to his unmarried time, and was again, as for so
many years, in the intimate life of his mother. But to-day, as he opened
the door, he was abruptly thrust out of his moment. His mother was in
her usual place on the high-backed sofa near the fire. She was doing
nothing, was just sitting with her hands, in their wrinkled gloves,
folded in her lap, and her large, round blue eyes looking. Dion thought
of them as looking because they were wide open, but they were strangely
emptied of expression. All of his mother seemed to him for just the one
instant which followed on his entrance to be emptied, as if the woman he
had always known--loving, satirical, clever, kind, observant--had been
poured away. The effect upon him was one of indescribable, almost of
horrible, dreariness. Omar Khayyam, his mother's black pug, was not in
the room as usual, stretched out before the fire.

Even as Dion realized this, his mother was poured back into the round
face and plump figure beside the fire, and greeted him with