carriage and be driven out of sight.
Looking down the vista of the long street, his eyes had a faraway tender
light, and as he turned and took up his pipe from the table his
thoughts slipped back into the province of memory. He settled himself
in his chair before his fire to muse a bit between the whiffs of his
heart-leaf.

And Mary Caroline Darrah's girl had come home--home to her own, he mused.
There was mystery in it, the mystery that sometimes brands the unborn.
Brown had never let Mary Caroline come back and the few letters she had
written had told them little of the life she led. The constraint had
wrung his wife's yearning heart. Only a letter had come when somehow
the news had reached her of the death of Matilda's boy, and it had been
wild and sweet and athrob with her love of them. And in its pages her own
hopes for the spring were confessed in a passion of desire to give and
claim sympathy. Her baby had been born and she was dead and buried before
they had heard of it; twenty-three years ago! And Matilda's grief for her
own child had been always mingled with love and longing for the
motherless, unattainable young thing across the distance. Brown had kept
the girl to himself and had never brought her back--because he _dared_
not.

The major's powerful old hands writhed around the arms of his chair and
his eyes glowed into the embers like live sparks. It was years, nearly
thirty years ago--but, God, how the tragedy of it came back! The hot
blood beat into his veins and he could feel it and see it all. Would
the picture always burn in his brain? Nearly thirty years ago--

The logs crashed apart in the hearth and with a start the major rose to
his feet, a tear dashed aside under his shaggy old eyebrows. He would go
back to his Immortals--and forget. Perhaps Phoebe would come in for
lunch. That would make forgetting easier.

Where had the girl been for the last few days? He smiled as he found
himself in something of David's dismay at not having seen the busy young
woman for quite a time.

And it was perhaps an hour later that, as he sat in the breakfast room
partaking of his lunch in solitary comfort, lost to the world, his wish
for her brought its materialization. He had the morning's paper propped
up before him and an outspread book rested by his plate, while he
held a large volume balanced on his knee, which he paused occasionally to
consult.

Mrs. Buchanan had telephoned that she would be home with her