of fresh air. Was it Pomona though?--or
was it the tea? Reserve gave way to an impulse of informal speech:--"My
dear, you have had babies of your own?"

Pomona's open-eyed smile seemed to spread to her very finger-tips.
"Babies? _Me?_" she exclaimed. "Yes, indeed! But not so very many, if
you count them. Five, all told! Two of my little girls I lost--'tis a
many years agone now. My two boys are aboard ship, one in the Black Sea,
one in the Baltic. My eldest on the _Agamemnon_. My second--he's but
sixteen--on the _Tithonus_. But he's seen service--he was at Bomarsund
in August. Please God, when the war is over, they'll come back with a
many tales for their mother and their granny! I lie awake and pray for
them, nights."

The old lady kept her thoughts to herself--even spoke with unwarranted
confidence of these boys' return. She shied off the subject,
nevertheless. How about the other little girl, the one that still
remained undescribed?

"My married daughter? She is my youngest. She's married to John
Costrell's son at Denby's farm. Maisie. Her first little boy is just
over a year old."

Old Maisie brightened, interested, at the name. A young Maisie, so near
at hand! "My own name!" she said. "To think of that!" Yet, after all,
the name was a common one.

"Called after her grandmother," said Ruth Thrale, equably--chattily.
"Mother has gone over to-day to make up for not going on his birthday."
Of course the "grandmother" alluded to was her own proper mother, the
young mother on whose head that old silver hair she was watching so
unconsciously had been golden brown, fifty years ago. For all that, Ruth
spoke of her aunt as "mother," automatically. What wonder that old
Maisie accepted Granny Marrable's Christian name as the same as her own.
"My name is the same as your mother's, then!" seemed worth saying, on
the whole, though it put nothing very uncommon on record.

How near the spark was to the tinder!--how loud that Angel would have
had to play! For Ruth Thrale might easily have chanced to say:--"Yes,
the same that my mother's was." And that past tense might have spoken a
volume.

But Destiny was at fault, and the Angel would have had to play
_pianissimo_. Miss Lupin came in, bearing a log that had taken twenty
years to grow and one to dry. The glowing embers were getting spent, and
the open hearth called for reimbursement. It seemed a shame those sweet
fresh lichens should burn; but then, it would never do to le