obliged to worry over it," returned Mrs. Treadwell irritably, while
she watched her daughter arrange her plate and pour out the green tea
from the little Rebecca-at-the-well teapot. "I don't see what got into
my head and made me do it. Why, his branch of the Treadwells had petered
out until they were as common as dirt."

"Well, it's too late to mend matters, so we'd better turn in and try to
make the best of them." She held out an oyster on the end of a fork, and
her mother received and ate it obediently.

"If I could only once understand why I did it, I think I could rest
easier, Susan."

"Perhaps you were in love with each other. I've heard of such a thing."

"Well, if I was going to fall in love, I reckon I could have found
somebody better to fall in love with," retorted Mrs. Treadwell with the
same strange excitement in her manner. Then she took up her knife and
fork and began to eat her luncheon with relish.

At five o'clock that afternoon, when Susan reached the house in Prince
Street, Virginia, with her youngest child in her arms, was just stepping
out of a dilapidated "hack," from which a grinning negro driver handed a
collection of lunch baskets into the eager hands of the rector and Mrs.
Pendleton, who stood on the pavement.

"Here's Susan!" called Mrs. Pendleton in her cheerful voice, rather as
if she feared her daughter would overlook her friend in the excitement
of homecoming.

"Oh, you darling Susan!" exclaimed Virginia, kissing her over the head
of a sleeping child in her arms. "This is Jenny--poor little thing, she
hasn't been able to keep her eyes open. Don't you think she is the
living image of our Saint Memin portrait of great-grandmamma?"

"She's a cherub," said Susan. "Let me look at you first, Jinny. I want
to see if you've changed."

"Well, you can't expect me to look exactly as I did before I had four
babies!" returned Virginia with a happy laugh. She was thinner, and
there were dark circles of fatigue from the long journey under her eyes,
but the Madonna-like possibilities in her face were fulfilled, and it
seemed to Susan that she was, if anything, lovelier than before. The
loss of her girlish bloom was forgotten in the expression of love and
goodness which irradiated her features. She wore a black cloth skirt,
and a blouse of some ugly blue figured silk finished at the neck with
the lace scarf Susan had sent her at Christmas. Her hat was a
characterless black straw trimmed with a bu