'Consent'?" she said, fiercely. "Carl, I just hate her!" The
long-smothered instinct of maternity leaped up and scorched her like a
flame; she put her dimpled hands over her face and cried.

He tried to tell her that she wasn't just. "After all, dear, we disowned
him. Naturally, she feels that he belongs to her."

But she could not be just: "He belongs to us! And she prejudices him
against us. I know she does. I said to him yesterday that her clothes
weren't very fashionable. I just said it for fun; and he said, 'You shut
up!'"

"_What!_" Johnny's father said, amused and horrified.

"I believe she likes him to be rude to me," Mary said.

Her jealousy of Miss Lydia had taken the form of suspicion; if Johnny
was impertinent, if that shabby Miss Lydia meant more to him than she
did--the rich, beneficent, adoring Mrs. Robertson!--it must be because
Miss Lydia "influenced" him. It was to counteract that influence that
she planned the Christmas visit; if she could have him to herself, even
for a week, with all the enjoyments she would give him, she was sure she
could rout "that woman" from her place in his heart!

"I sha'n't ask for what is my own," she told Carl; "I'll just say I'm
going to take him for the Christmas holidays. She won't dare to say he
can't come!"

Yet when she went to tell Miss Lydia that Johnny was coming, her
certainty that the shabby woman wouldn't "dare," faded.

Miss Lydia was in the kitchen, making cookies for her boy, and she could
not instantly leave her rolling-pin when his mother knocked at the front
door. Mary had not been at that door since the September night when she
had crouched, sobbing, on the steps. And now again it was September,
and again the evening primroses were opening in the dusk. . . . As she
knocked, a breath of their subtle perfume brought back that other dusk,
and for an instant she was engulfed in a surge of memory. She felt faint
and leaned against the door, waiting for Miss Lydia's little running
step in the hall. She could hardly speak when the door opened.
"Good--good evening," she said, in a whisper.

Miss Lydia, her frightened eyes peering at her caller from under that
black frizette, could hardly speak herself. Mary was the one to get
herself in hand first. "May I come in, Miss Sampson?"

"Why, yes--" said Miss Lydia, doubtfully, and dusted her floury hands
together.

"I came to say," Mary began, following her back to the kitchen, "I
came--"

"I'm making c