her head with a half smile. "I simply remember more than
you do."

"What more?" he began with a flush of anger; but she raised a quieting
hand.

"What does all that matter--if, now that we need her, we can't get her?"

He made no answer, and she returned to the dispensing of his tea; but as
she rose to put the cup in his hand he asked, half querulously: "You
think it's going to be very bad for the child, then?"

Mrs. Ansell smiled with the thin edge of her lips. "One can hardly set
the police after her----!"

"No; we're powerless," he groaned in assent.

As the cup passed between them she dropped her eyes to his with a quick
flash of interrogation; but he sat staring moodily before him, and she
moved back to the sofa without a word.

* * * * *

On the way downstairs she met Amherst descending from Cicely's room.

Since the early days of his first marriage there had always been, on
Amherst's side, a sense of obscure antagonism toward Mrs. Ansell. She
was almost the embodied spirit of the world he dreaded and disliked: her
serenity, her tolerance, her adaptability, seemed to smile away and
disintegrate all the high enthusiasms, the stubborn convictions, that he
had tried to plant in the shifting sands of his married life. And now
that Bessy's death had given her back the attributes with which his
fancy had originally invested her, he had come to regard Mrs. Ansell as
embodying the evil influences that had come between himself and his
wife.

Mrs. Ansell was probably not unaware of the successive transitions of
feeling which had led up to this unflattering view; but her life had
been passed among petty rivalries and animosities, and she had the
patience and adroitness of the spy in a hostile camp.

She and Amherst exchanged a few words about Cicely; then she exclaimed,
with a glance through the panes of the hall door: "But I must be
off--I'm on foot, and the crossings appal me after dark."

He could do no less, at that, than offer to guide her across the perils
of Fifth Avenue; and still talking of Cicely, she led him down the
thronged thoroughfare till her own corner was reached, and then her own
door; turning there to ask, as if by an afterthought: "Won't you come
up? There's one thing more I want to say."

A shade of reluctance crossed his face, which, as the vestibule light
fell on it, looked hard and tired, like a face set obstinately against a
winter gale; but he murmure