ied, or at least postponed.

Raymond heard in silence my account of the doings on the Atlantic shore:
only a wry twist of the mouth and a flare of the nostrils. But as the
weeks went on, and still no Albert, his anger became articulate.

"I shall teach her that an agreement is an agreement," he declared. "She
will never try this again."

Albert finally came home, three weeks late; his mother brought him
herself. The governess transferred him from the hands of one parent to
those of the other; and Raymond had asked my presence for that moment,
as a sort of moral urge.

"Who knows," he asked, "what delay she may try for next?"

He gave one look at the picturesque, if not fantastic, toggery of his
restored child.

"Did you ever see anything like that?" he said scornfully; and I foresaw
a sacrificial bonfire--or its equivalent--with Albert presently clothed
in sane autumn garb.

Albert was followed, within a week, by a letter from his mother. This
was diffuse and circumlocutory, like the first. But its general sense
was clear. If Raymond was thinking of putting Albert into a
boarding-school....

"There she goes again!" exclaimed the exacerbated father. "A matter with
which, by hard-and-fast agreement, she has absolutely nothing to do!"

However, if he was thinking of a boarding-school....

"A child barely seven!" cried Raymond. "Why, half of them will hardly
consider one of eight!"

Still, if he was thinking--well, Mrs. McComas knew of a charming one, an
old-established one, one in which the head-master's wife, a delightful,
motherly soul.... And it was just within the Wisconsin line, not forty
miles from town....

"I see her camping at the gate!" said Raymond bitterly. "Or taking a
house there. Or spending months at a hotel near by. Constantly fussing
round the edge of things. Running in on every visitors' day...."

"Likely enough," I said. "A mother's a mother."

"Well," rejoined Raymond, "the boy _shall_ go to school--in another
year. But the school will be a good deal more than forty miles from
here--no continual week-end trips. And it will not be in a town that has
an endurable hotel--that ought to be easy to arrange, in this part of
the world. No, it won't be near any town at all. I don't suppose she
would take a--tent?" he queried sardonically.

"To some mothers the blue tent of heaven would alone suffice," I
said--perhaps unworthily.

"Rubbish!" he ejaculated; and I felt that a word fitly spoken-