nd the shabby, silent mother
with her busy, tired hands and her frozen heart. It was all gone, like
a dream of struggle and shame, love and hate, joy and suffering.

One day, with Teddy and Clifford, she went up to the old house. Ruth,
clean and mannerly, raised her innocent girl's face for her new
mother's kiss, for Ruth was in the secret. Martie liked Ruth, a simple,
normal little person who played "jacks" and "houses" with her friends
under the lilac trees, and had a "best dress" and loved "Little Women"
with a shy passion. Martie foresaw only a pleasant relationship with
the child. What she lacked in imagination was more than made up in
sense. Ruth would graduate, marry, have children, as placidly as a
stout and sturdy little cow. But Martie and Ruth would always love,
even if they did not understand, each other.

The house was old-fashioned: big double parlours, big folding doors,
and one enormous square bathroom on the second floor, for the needs of
all the house. The cheerful, orderly pantries smelt of painted wood;
the kitchen had cost old Polly two or three unnecessary miles of
walking every month of her twenty-six years' tenancy. Martie liked the
garden best, and the old stables painted white. She loved the rich
mingled scents of wallflower and alyssum and lemon verbena; and, as
they walked about, she tucked a velvet plume of dark heliotrope into
the belt of her thin white gown. "My first colour!" she said to
Clifford.

Ruth assumed charming, older-sister airs with Teddy. She laughed at his
comments, and quoted him to Martie: "He says he's going to learn to
ride Whitey!" "He says he doesn't like such big houses!"

Clifford opened doors and smiled at Martie's interest. She could see
that he loved every inch of the old place. She saw herself everywhere,
writing checks at the old walnut desk, talking with Polly in the
pantry. She could sow Shirley poppies in the bed beneath the side
windows; she could have Mrs. Hunter, the village sewing woman,
comfortably established here in the sewing-room for weeks, if she
liked, making ginghams for Ruth and Ruth's new mother.

When those days came Clifford would gradually abandon this unwelcome
role of lover, and be her kindly, middle-aged old friend again.
Sometimes, in the new shrinking reluctance she felt when they were
alone, she wondered what had become of the old Clifford. There was
something vaguely offending, something a little undignified, about this
fatuous, e