and
last year's wardrobe made her firm in her stand.

"Grace," she said, one day, "listen to me: I want you to get some
clothes--a lot of them, and foolish ones, all of them. Babies are all
very well, but husbands have some slight right to consideration. The
clock, for you, is an instrument devised to cut up the day and night
into your baby's eating- and sleeping-periods. I want you to get some
floppy hats with roses on 'em, and dresses with ruffles and sashes.
I'll stay home and guard your child from vandals and ogres. Scat!"

Her stay lengthened to four weeks, five weeks, six. She had the
satisfaction of seeing the roses blooming in Grace's cheeks as well as
in her hats. She learned to efface her own personality that others
might shine who had a better right. And she lost some of her own
bright color, a measure of her own buoyancy. In the sixth week she
saw, in her mirror, something that caused her to lean forward, to stare
for one intent moment, then to shrink back, wide-eyed. A little
sunburst, hair-fine but undeniable, was etched delicately about the
corners of her eyes. Fifteen minutes later, she had wired New York
thus:

Home Friday. Do you still love me? EMMA.

When she left, little Emma McChesney was sleeping, by a curious
coincidence, as she had been when Emma arrived, so that she could not
have the satisfaction of a last pressure of the lips against the
rose-petal cheek. She had to content herself with listening close to
the door in the vain hope of catching a last sound of the child's
breathing.

She was laden with fruits and flowers and magazines on her departure,
as she had been when she left New York. But, somehow, these things did
not seem to interest her. After the train had left Chicago's smoky
buildings far behind, she sat very still for a long time, her eyes
shut. She told herself that she felt and looked very old, very tired,
very unlike the Emma McChesney Buck who had left New York a few weeks
before. Then she thought of T. A., and her eyes unclosed and she
smiled. By the time the train had reached Cleveland the little lines
seemed miraculously to have disappeared, somehow, from about her eyes.
When they left the One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street station she was
a creature transformed. And when the train rolled into the great
down-town shed, Emma was herself again, bright-eyed, alert, vibrating
energy.

There was no searching, no hesitation. Her eyes met his, an