o say at meetings of The Ladies' Aid or The Tuesday Club,
"Well, Marty says his mother's _his_ girl!" Martin himself was heavily
cheerful; he could see that Edward R. Hunter was pretty much tied down.
It would not be very long, now, before there was no "Asst." in front of
the "Cashier" on his door at the bank.

The Hunters had now what the humorist, Edward R., called "almost three
children," and they were building on a new nursery which would be,
without doubt, a hot, pink one. They had a little way of saying, "What
have you been writing lately, Janey?" which conveyed, pleasantly but
unmistakably, that people with their full and busy lives could not be
expected to keep up with all the lighter current literature. Sarah
Farraday, her earnest, blonde face a little lined and sharpened, had more
piano pupils than she could possibly manage; two of her older girls were
taking the beginners for her, and there was a recital almost every month
in the burlapped studio where once the chubby driving horses had been
housed. And in the old, elm-shaded house where the middle-aged maid still
held sway, and where Aunt Lydia Vail had lived and died in her plump and
pleasant creed, Jane and Sarah spent the night together, and this time
there was no sprightly talk of Michael Daragh or Rodney Harrison and no
pungent comparisons of them and their feelings for her; she was not
talking now, the nimble-tongued Miss Vail, but the friend of her youth
looked long at her glowing face, her deeply joyful eyes, and wondered,
and sighed a little, and went back to talk of her most brilliant pupils
and the worrying way her mother had of taking hard colds and keeping
them....

Jane came away from her village with an entirely clear conscience; no one
needed her there. She was her own woman, without let or hindrance, with a
shining sense of good work and good works she could wait for the joy
which was coming as certainly as the morning.

Then she came in late, one evening, to find Michael Daragh at the dinner
table, a little browned and warmed from good sea air, and Emma Ellis was
there--Mrs. Hills having telephoned and asked her to come to dinner and
welcome home the wanderer--and at once the old life, the old routine, the
old world, seemed to open and swallow him completely.

Lying wide-eyed in the dark, hours later, Jane told herself that even in
the midst of the watching boarders his look and word for her had been
filled with meaning; that it was inev