I
can't let it go on so. I don't see how you can rest easy without
knowing."

"I don't in the least know what's going to become of me when I die; and
yet I sleep well," replied Bromfield Corey, putting his newspaper aside.

"Ah! but this is a very different thing."

"So much more serious? Well, what can you do? We had this out when you
were here in the summer, and you agreed with me then that we could do
nothing. The situation hasn't changed at all."

"Yes, it has; it has continued the same," said Mrs. Corey, again
expressing the fact by a contradiction in terms. "I think I must ask
Tom outright."

"You know you can't do that, my dear."

"Then why doesn't he tell us?"

"Ah, that's what HE can't do, if he's making love to Miss Irene--that's
her name, I believe--on the American plan. He will tell us after he
has told HER. That was the way I did. Don't ignore our own youth,
Anna. It was a long while ago, I'll admit."

"It was very different," said Mrs. Corey, a little shaken.

"I don't see how. I dare say Mamma Lapham knows whether Tom is in love
with her daughter or not; and no doubt Papa Lapham knows it at second
hand. But we shall not know it until the girl herself does. Depend
upon that. Your mother knew, and she told your father; but my poor
father knew nothing about it till we were engaged; and I had been
hanging about--dangling, as you call it----"

"No, no; YOU called it that."

"Was it I?--for a year or more."

The wife could not refuse to be a little consoled by the image of her
young love which the words conjured up, however little she liked its
relation to her son's interest in Irene Lapham. She smiled pensively.
"Then you think it hasn't come to an understanding with them yet?"

"An understanding? Oh, probably."

"An explanation, then?"

"The only logical inference from what we've been saying is that it
hasn't. But I don't ask you to accept it on that account. May I read
now, my dear?"

"Yes, you may read now," said Mrs. Corey, with one of those sighs which
perhaps express a feminine sense of the unsatisfactoriness of husbands
in general, rather than a personal discontent with her own.

"Thank you, my dear; then I think I'll smoke too," said Bromfield
Corey, lighting a cigar.

She left him in peace, and she made no further attempt upon her son's
confidence. But she was not inactive for that reason. She did not, of
course, admit to herself, and far less to others, the moti