s in her ever-young blue eyes--eyes of a girl gazing
out from the round, rosy-apple face of a middle-aged woman.

She was always the same in her ways and manner, if it could be called
manner: comfortable and comforting, contented with life as it was,
happy in her children, and putting up gently with her husband;
but--when you had said good-bye to her you remembered the look which
always changed instantly into a smile when it met yours. You
remembered, and seemed to see another woman hovering wraithlike behind
mother's plump figure, as she sat contentedly crocheting those endless
strips of trimming for towels and things--mother as she might have
been if no dominating nature had ringed hers in with an iron fence.

When Peter was up the White Nile, in elephant and lion land, he used
suddenly, mysteriously, to see an irrelevant vision of his mother
just stretching out plump arms to say good-bye to him in his own room
which he had furnished with the mahogany odds and ends that had
started her bridal housekeeping. She had smiled and had not seemed to
mind very much his going--not half as much as a hen mother minds its
duckling's first dash into water. And yet her eyes--There are some
things it hurts and at the same time warms your heart to think of at
the other end of the world.

Peter had gone up the White Nile to shoot big game; but when he met it
face to face, on a social equality, so to speak, he wondered how he
could ever have harboured so monstrously caddish a design. He found
the animals he had thought he wanted to kill so much handsomer and
more important than himself that he felt like begging the alleged
"game's" pardon for calling on it without invitation in its country
home (as if he'd been a book agent), and bowed himself away with only
a few photographs to remember it by. While Ena was working up
conversations to the point of mentioning "my brother, who is such a
great shot, you know, and is shooting big game in Africa," Peter's
only shots were snapshots, and he was too stupidly conscientious to
atone for his weakness by obtaining elephant tusks and lion skins with
coins instead of bullets.

He wished he had saved Egypt and its temples for his honeymoon, in
case he should ever find exactly the right girl, for the mystery and
wonder made him sad because he had nobody to feel it with him. It was
the same in India and all the East, and there were thousands of
thoughts imprisoned in his breast (which he hardly un