She was a stranger to herself; she was not the same Phil
Kirkwood who had stood before the glass that morning, but a very
different person--a Phil who had come suddenly upon a hidden crevasse
in the bright, even meadow of her life and peered into an undreamed-of
abyss.

If her mother--that mother who had always lived less vividly in her
imagination than her favorite characters in fiction--had not proved so
bewilderingly, so enthrallingly captivating, so wholly charming and
lovable, she might have grappled the situation with some certainty. But
no woman had ever been like that! Her mother was the most wonderful
being in the world! Little by little through the years her aunts had
been creating in Phil's mind a vulgar, vain, wicked figure and pointing
to it as a fair portrait of her mother. She had always disliked her
aunts; she found herself hating them now with a passionate intensity
that frightened her.

She flung herself down in the window-seat and looked toward Main Street
with unseeing eyes. A wonderful voice murmured in her ears, speaking a
new language. She tried to recall what had been said as she crouched at
her mother's feet, her head in her lap, before the fire in Amzi's
living-room; but it was like the futile effort to recall an elusive
strain of music. She had felt curiously no disparity of years in that
interview; it had been like a talk with a newfound sister, or with a
girl with whom she had established one of the sudden intimate
friendships of school days. This wonderful Lois touched with a warm
brilliancy innumerable points and surfaces that flashed and gleamed
before Phil's fascinated, eager eyes. She had satisfied her curiosity as
to Phil in a dozen direct questions that elicited information without
leaving any ground for discussing it. Was Phil well?--and happy? What
was Phil most interested in? Had there been money enough for her needs?
And always with the implication that if the answers to these questions
should not prove satisfactory, it did not greatly matter, as the
deficiencies could easily be supplied.

They were to see each other, Phil and this enchanting mother--to-morrow;
yes, there had been definite agreement upon that. But Lois had seemed as
indifferent to days after to-morrow as to days before yesterday. And
while this troubled Phil, she had caught so much of her mother's spirit,
she had been so responsive to the new amazing language that fell so
fascinatingly from her mother's lips, t