owing a
little hard, exchanging slimness for leanness and austerity of figure,
flat-chested, thin-voiced. One blossomed and withered, then, or one
shriveled up without having flowered. All at once it seemed very
terrible to her. She felt as if she had been caught in an inexorable
hand that had closed about her.

Harriet found her a little later, face down on her mother's bed, crying
as if her heart would break. She scolded her roundly.

"You've been overworking," she said. "You've been getting thinner. Your
measurements for that suit showed it. I have never approved of this
hospital training, and after last January--"

She could hardly credit her senses when Sidney, still swollen with
weeping, told her of her engagement.

"But I don't understand. If you care for him and he has asked you to
marry him, why on earth are you crying your eyes out?"

"I do care. I don't know why I cried. It just came over me, all at once,
that I--It was just foolishness. I am very happy, Aunt Harriet."

Harriet thought she understood. The girl needed her mother, and she,
Harriet, was a hard, middle-aged woman and a poor substitute. She patted
Sidney's moist hand.

"I guess I understand," she said. "I'll attend to your wedding things,
Sidney. We'll show this street that even Christine Lorenz can be
outdone." And, as an afterthought: "I hope Max Wilson will settle down
now. He's been none too steady."

K. had taken Christine to see Tillie that Sunday afternoon. Palmer
had the car out--had, indeed, not been home since the morning of the
previous day. He played golf every Saturday afternoon and Sunday at the
Country Club, and invariably spent the night there. So K. and Christine
walked from the end of the trolley line, saying little, but under K.'s
keen direction finding bright birds in the hedgerows, hidden field
flowers, a dozen wonders of the country that Christine had never dreamed
of.

The interview with Tillie had been a disappointment to K. Christine,
with the best and kindliest intentions, struck a wrong note. In her
endeavor to cover the fact that everything in Tillie's world was wrong,
she fell into the error of pretending that everything was right.

Tillie, grotesque of figure and tragic-eyed, listened to her patiently,
while K. stood, uneasy and uncomfortable, in the wide door of the
hay-barn and watched automobiles turning in from the road. When
Christine rose to leave, she confessed her failure frankly.

"I've meant we