.

Father was at the station to meet her; and at home, by the soft-coal
fire burning beneath the white marble mantel in the sitting-room,
Mother was sewing and waiting for her.

Mary Alice was thinking, as she and Father neared the house, of that
miserable evening in the fall when she had stolen past her mother and
gone up to her room and wept passionately, in the dark, because life
had no enchantment for her. There would be no stealing past dear
Mother now! For the Secret was for Mother, too--yes, very much indeed
for Mother, as Mary Alice and Godmother had agreed in their wonderful
"tucking in" talk the night before Mary Alice came away. All the way
home, on the train, she had hardly been able to wait till she got to
Mother with this beautiful new thing in her heart.

Perhaps Mother had dreaded her girl's home-coming, in a way, almost as
much as she yearned for it. But if she had, Mary Alice never knew it;
and if she had, Mother herself soon forgot it. For in all the twenty
years of Mary Alice's life, her mother had never, it seemed, had so
much of her girl as in the month that followed her home-coming. Hour
after hour they worked about the house or sat before that grate fire in
the unchanged sitting-room, and talked and talked and talked. Mary
Alice told every little detail of those four months until her mother
lived them over with her and the light and life of them animated her as
they had animated Mary Alice.

Little by little, in that month, Mary Alice came at least to the
beginning of a wonderful new understanding: came to see how
parents--and _god_parents!--cease to have any particular future of
their own and live in the futures of the young things they love. Mary
Alice's bleak years had been bitter for her mother, too; perhaps
bitterer than for her. And her new enchantment with life was like new
blood in her mother's veins.

Mother cried when Mary Alice told her the Secret. "Oh, it's true! it's
true!" she said. "If only everybody could know it, what a different
world this would be!"

And as for the--Other! When Mary Alice told her mother about him and
what his coming into her life and his going out of it had meant, Mother
just held her girl close and could not speak.

The precious month flew by on wings as of the wind. Mary Alice was
"the town wonder," as her brother Johnny said, and she enjoyed that as
only a girl who has been the town wall-flower can; but after all,
everything was as not