so!"

"Mother!" cried the girl, drawing out her needle to the full length of
her thread before she let her hand drop nervelessly at her side, and
she fell back to look fixedly at Mrs. Saunders. "If _that's_ the way
you feel!"

"I don't! I want you to go just as much as ever I did. But looking at
you there, just against the window, that way, I got to thinking you
wouldn't be there a great while; and----" Mrs. Saunders caught her
breath, and was mute a moment before she gave way and began to whimper.
From the force of habit she tried to whimper with one side of her
mouth, as she smiled, to keep her missing teeth from showing; and at
the sight of this characteristic effort, so familiar and so full of
long association, Cornelia's heart melted within her, and she ran to
her mother, and pulled her head down on her breast and covered the
unwhimpering cheek with kisses.

"Don't you suppose I think of that, too, mother? And when you go round
the room, or out in the yard, I just keep following you as if I was
magnetized, and I can see you with my eyes shut as well as I can with
them open; and I _know_ how I shall feel when that's all I've got of
you! But I'll soon be back! Why I'll be here in June again! And it's no
use, _now_. I've _got_ to go."

"Oh, yes," said her mother, pushing herself free, and entering upon so
prolonged a search for her handkerchief that her tears had almost time
to dry without it before she found it. "But that don't make it any
easier, child."

They had agreed from the time Cornelia made up her mind to go, and they
had vowed the Burtons to secrecy, that they were not to tell any one
till just before she started; but it was not in Mrs. Saunders's nature
or the nature of things, that she should keep her part of the
agreement. She was so proud of Cornelia's going to study art in New
York, and going on her own money, that she would have told all her
customers that she was going, even if it had not proved such a good
excuse for postponing and delaying the work they brought her.

It was all over town before the first week was out, and the fact had
been canvassed in and out of the presence of the principals, with much
the same frankness. What Cornelia had in excess of a putting-down pride
her mother correspondingly lacked; what the girl forbade, Mrs. Saunders
invited by her manner, and there were not many people, or at least many
ladies, in Pymantoning, who could not put their hands on their hearts
and