old her it did."

Mathilde craned her neck over her shoulder, as if she had ever been able
to see the middle of her back.

"But it doesn't show, does it?" she asked.

"It perfectly well might."

Mathilde stepped out of her dress, and flung it over a chair. In her
short petticoat, with her ankles showing and her arms bare, she looked
like a very young girl, and when she put up her hands and took the pins
out of her hair, so that it fell over her shoulders, she might have
been a child.

The silence began to grow awkward. Mathilde put on her dressing-gown; it
was perfectly straight, and made her look like a little white column. A
glass of milk and some biscuits were waiting for her. She pushed a chair
near her fire for her mother, and herself remained standing, with her
glass of milk in her hand.

"Mama," she said suddenly, "I suppose I'm what you'd call engaged."

"O Mathilde! not to that boy who was here to-day?"

"Why not to him?"

"I know nothing about him."

"I don't know very much myself. Yes, it's Pete Wayne. Pierson his name
is, but every one calls him Pete. How strange it was that I did not even
know his first name when you asked me!"

A single ray pierced Mrs. Farron's depression: Vincent had known,
Vincent's infallibility was confirmed. She did not know what to say. She
sat looking sadly, obliquely at the floor like a person who has been
aggrieved. She was wondering whether she should be to her daughter a
comrade or a ruler, a confederate or a policeman. Of course in all
probability the thing would be better stopped. But could this be
accomplished by immediate action, or could she invite confidences and yet
commit herself to nothing?

She raised her eyes.

"I do not approve of youthful marriages," she said.

"O Mama! And you were only eighteen yourself."

"That is why."

Mathilde was frightened not only by the intense bitterness of her
mother's tone, but also by the obvious fact that she was face to face
with the explanation of the separation of her parents. She had been only
nine years old at the time. She had loved her father, had found him a
better playfellow than her mother, had wept bitterly at parting with him,
and had missed him. And then gradually her mother, who had before seemed
like a beautiful, but remote, princess, had begun to make of her an
intimate and grown-up friend, to consult her and read with her and
arrange happinesses in her life, to win, to, if the truth must be told,