come in again. Get to sleep yourself.'

The mother, however, went thinking anew. She had no apprehensions about
this marriage. She felt perfectly sure that it was the best thing she
could do for her girl. Not a young woman on the island but was envying
Avice at that moment; for Jocelyn was absurdly young for three score,
a good-looking man, one whose history was generally known here; as also
were the exact figures of the fortune he had inherited from his father,
and the social standing he could claim--a standing, however, which that
fortune would not have been large enough to procure unassisted by his
reputation in his art.

But Avice had been weak enough, as her mother knew, to indulge in
fancies for local youths from time to time, and Mrs. Pierston could not
help congratulating herself that her daughter had been so docile in the
circumstances. Yet to every one except, perhaps, Avice herself, Jocelyn
was the most romantic of lovers. Indeed was there ever such a romance
as that man embodied in his relations to her house? Rejecting the first
Avice, the second had rejected him, and to rally to the third with final
achievement was an artistic and tender finish to which it was ungrateful
in anybody to be blind.

The widow thought that the second Avice might probably not have rejected
Pierston on that occasion in the London studio so many years ago if
destiny had not arranged that she should have been secretly united to
another when the proposing moment came.

But what had come was best. 'My God,' she said at times that night, 'to
think my aim in writing to him should be fulfilling itself like this!'

When all was right and done, what a success upon the whole her life
would have been. She who had begun her career as a cottage-girl, a
small quarry-owner's daughter, had sunk so low as to the position
of laundress, had engaged in various menial occupations, had made an
unhappy marriage for love which had, however, in the long run, thanks to
Jocelyn's management, much improved her position, was at last to see
her daughter secure what she herself had just missed securing, and
established in a home of affluence and refinement.

Thus the sick woman excited herself as the hours went on. At last, in
her tenseness it seemed to her that the time had already come at which
the household was stirring, and she fancied she heard conversation in
her daughter's room. But she found that it was only five o'clock, and
not yet daylight. He