ur mother." She paused, and then added hurriedly,
the blood flushing up to her forehead: "That is--and Ellen. You know
I told you we'd had a long talk one afternoon--and how dear she was to
me."

"Ah--" said Archer, his heart stopping.

He felt that his wife was watching him intently. "Did you MIND my
telling her first, Newland?"

"Mind? Why should I?" He made a last effort to collect himself. "But
that was a fortnight ago, wasn't it? I thought you said you weren't
sure till today."

Her colour burned deeper, but she held his gaze. "No; I wasn't sure
then--but I told her I was. And you see I was right!" she exclaimed,
her blue eyes wet with victory.

XXXIV.

Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in East
Thirty-ninth Street.

He had just got back from a big official reception for the inauguration
of the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, and the spectacle of
those great spaces crowded with the spoils of the ages, where the
throng of fashion circulated through a series of scientifically
catalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory.

"Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms," he heard some one
say; and instantly everything about him vanished, and he was sitting
alone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figure
in a long sealskin cloak moved away down the meagrely-fitted vista of
the old Museum.

The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking
with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the
scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.

It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had
happened. There his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to
him, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the young
women of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have a
child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken to
church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the Bishop
of New York, the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so long the
pride and ornament of his diocese. There Dallas had first staggered
across the floor shouting "Dad," while May and the nurse laughed behind
the door; there their second child, Mary (who was so like her mother),
had announced her engagement to the dullest and most reliable of Reggie
Chivers's many sons; and there Archer had kissed her thro