his one brought it
back--this and the leaves. Only there was nothing for the dog-cart."

"And only mamma for the girl"--thus Sally the irrepressible. And then
mamma laughed, but not Mr. Fenwick at all. Only Sally thought her
mother's laugh came hard, and said to herself, now she should catch
it for chaffing! However, she didn't catch it, although the abruptness
with which her mother said good-night and went back into the house
half confirmed her impression that she should.

On the contrary, when she followed her a few minutes later, having
accompanied Fenwick to near the road end, and scampered back to the
house, turning to throw Parthian good-nights after him, she found her
mother pale and thoughtful, and surely the lips and hands she used to
kiss her with were cold. She wasn't even sure that wasn't a tear.
Perhaps it was.

For mamma had had a bad ten minutes--scarcely a _mauvais quart
d'heure_--and even that short interim had given her time to see that
this kind of thing would be incessant with her recovered husband,
granting that she could recover him. Only of that she felt nearly
secure--unaccountably, perhaps; certainly not warrantably. But how to
bear this kind of thing through a life?--that was the question.

What was this kind of thing, this bad ten minutes, that had made her
tremble, and turn white, and glad to get away, and be alone a minute
before Sally came up jubilant? But oh, how glad, for all that, to get
at her daughter's lips to kiss!--only not too hard, so as to suggest
reflection and analysis.

What had upset Mrs. Nightingale was a counter-memory of twenty years
ago, a clear and full and vivid recollection of the garden and the
girl and the dog-cart. And then also there "had only been mamma for
the girl." But oh, the relation the lassie who said those words bore
to those past days, her place in the drama that filled them out!
Little wonder her mother's brain reeled.

She could see it all vividly now, all over again. A glorious night
like this; a dazzling full moon sailing in the blue beyond the tumbled
chaos of loose cloud so near the earth; the riot of the wind-swept
trees fighting to keep a shred of their old green on their bareness,
making new concessions to the blast, and beating their stripped limbs
together in their despair; the endless swirl of leaves at liberty,
free now at last to enjoy a short and merry life before becoming food
for worms. She could see the face she had just parted fr