ut emotion, as one states a
fact. Then she rose and picked up her glove. "Sometimes I've thrown my
arms out and felt I could scream, it all has seemed so poor and
crowded and hateful to me," which was large unburdening of self for
Emily. Then she went. At the door she laid the flower on a chair.

The three weeks of Molly's illness brought it to the end of August,
and, as she convalesced, Alexina began to plan for Aden. In the midst
of her preparations the Major and Harriet returned.

She went out to the house the morning of their arrival. The luggage
was being unloaded at the curb as she reached the gate, and, hearing
voices as she stepped on the porch, she looked in at the parlour
window. Harriet, her hat yet on, was bending her head that little
Stevie, urged by his mother, might kiss her. The baby was no shyer
about it than the woman, yet the woman smiled as the baby's lips
touched her face.

As she rose she saw Alexina and came to the door to meet her. She
kissed the girl almost with embarrassment, yet kept hold of her hands,
while suddenly her eyes filled with something she tried to laugh away.

"I had your letter," she was saying, "and resent it, too, that you are
going, and so does Stephen." Her face changed, her voice grew
hesitant, hurried. "He's never going to be better than now"--was it a
sob?--"but since I may have him, may keep him, and he is willing now
to live so for me, though not at first, not at first-- Oh, Alexina, it
has been bitter!"

Alexina followed her into the parlour. The Major was there in a
wheeled chair, the babies afar off, refusing to obey the maternal
pokes and pushes to go to him, and regarding him and his wheeled
affair with furtive, wide-eyed suspicion. The eyes of the Major were
full of the humour of it.

"Now had I been a gamboling satyr on hoofs they would have accepted me
at once," he assured Alexina. "It's this mingling of the familiar with
the unnatural--"

He was holding the girl's hand while he spoke and looking up keenly at
her pretty, tired face. There had been enough in her letters for them
to have divined something of her trouble.

"To some it comes early, to others late, Alexina," he said quite
gently. He had noted the signs--the violet shadows beneath the baffled
young eyes, the hint of the tragedy in their depths.

Alexina sat down suddenly and, leaning her face on the arm of the
wheeled chair, began to cry, not that she meant to do it at all.

Time was when