e
direct answer to his question.

"At once? No--I can't see that the suggestion carries its explanation
with it."

Mrs. Ansell looked at him hesitatingly. She was conscious of the
ill-chosen word that still reverberated between them, and the unwonted
sense of having blundered made her, for the moment, less completely
mistress of herself.

"Ah, you'll see farther presently--" She rose again, unfurling her lace
sunshade, as if to give a touch of definiteness to her action. "It's
not, after all," she added, with a sweet frankness, "a case for
argument, and still less for persuasion. My reasons are excellent--I
should insist on putting them to you myself if they were not! But
they're so good that I can leave you to find them out--and to back them
up with your own, which will probably be a great deal better."

She summed up with a light nod, which included both Amherst and his
mother, and turning to descend the verandah steps, waved a signal to Mr.
Langhope, who was limping disconsolately toward the house.

"What has she been saying to you, mother?" Amherst asked, returning to
his seat beside his mother.

Mrs. Amherst replied by a shake of her head and a raised forefinger of
reproval. "Now, Johnny, I won't answer a single question till you smooth
out those lines between your eyes."

Her son relaxed his frown to smile back at her. "Well, dear, there have
to be some wrinkles in every family, and as you absolutely refuse to
take your share--" His eyes rested affectionately on the frosty sparkle
of her charming old face, which had, in its setting of recovered
prosperity, the freshness of a sunny winter morning, when the very snow
gives out a suggestion of warmth.

He remembered how, on the evening of his dismissal from the mills, he
had paused on the threshold of their sitting-room to watch her a moment
in the lamplight, and had thought with bitter compunction of the fresh
wrinkle he was about to add to the lines about her eyes. The three years
which followed had effaced that wrinkle and veiled the others in a tardy
bloom of well-being. From the moment of turning her back on Westmore,
and establishing herself in the pretty little house at Hanaford which
her son's wife had placed at her disposal, Mrs. Amherst had shed all
traces of the difficult years; and the fact that his marriage had
enabled him to set free, before it was too late, the pent-up springs of
her youthfulness, sometimes seemed to Amherst the clearest gain