strongly
about some things. And he hasn't forgiven me yet for letting you go."

Rather diffidently Lily put her hand on her mother's. She gave her rare
caresses shyly, with averted eyes, and she was always more diffident
with her mother than with her father. Such spontaneous bursts of
affection as she sometimes showed had been lavished on Mademoiselle.
It was Mademoiselle she had hugged rapturously on her small feast days,
Mademoiselle who never demanded affection, and so received it.

"Poor mother!" she said, "I have made it hard for you, haven't I? Is he
as bad as ever?"

She had not pinned on the violets, but sat holding them in her hands,
now and then taking a luxurious sniff. She did not seem to expect
a reply. Between Grace and herself it was quite understood that old
Anthony Cardew was always as bad as could be.

"There is some sort of trouble at the mill. Your father is worried."

And this time it was Lily who did not reply. She said,
inconsequentially:

"We're saved, and it's all over. But sometimes I wonder if we were worth
saving. It all seems such a mess, doesn't it?" She glanced out.
They were drawing up before the house, and she looked at her mother
whimsically.

"The last of the Cardews returning from the wars!" she said. "Only she
is unfortunately a she, and she hasn't been any nearer the war than the
State of Ohio."

Her voice was gay enough, but she had a quick vision of the grim
old house had she been the son they had wanted to carry on the name,
returning from France.

The Cardews had fighting traditions. They had fought in every war from
the Revolution on. There had been a Cardew in Mexico in '48, and in that
upper suite of rooms to which her grandfather had retired in wrath on
his son's marriage, she remembered her sense of awe as a child on seeing
on the wall the sword he had worn in the Civil War. He was a small man,
and the scabbard was badly worn at the end, mute testimony to the long
forced marches of his youth. Her father had gone to Cuba in '98, and
had almost died of typhoid fever there, contracted in the marshes of
Florida.

Yes, they had been a fighting family. And now--

Her mother was determinedly gay. There were flowers in the dark old
hall, and Grayson, the butler, evidently waiting inside the door,
greeted her with the familiarity of the old servant who had slipped her
sweets from the pantry after dinner parties in her little-girl years.

"Welcome home, Miss Lily," h