amask.

"Please make haste, my dear," she said; "I have to be at Brighton at
three."

Oliver gulped his last mouthful, pushed his plate over the line, glanced
to see if all plates were there, and then put his hand beneath the
table.

Instantly, without a sound, the centre-piece vanished, and the three
waited unconcernedly while the clink of dishes came from beneath.

Old Mrs. Brand was a hale-looking old lady, rosy and wrinkled, with the
mantilla head-dress of fifty years ago; but she, too, looked a little
depressed this morning. The _entree_ was not very successful, she
thought; the new food-stuff was not up to the old, it was a trifle
gritty: she would see about it afterwards. There was a clink, a soft
sound like a push, and the centre-piece snapped into its place, bearing
an admirable imitation of a roasted fowl.

Oliver and his wife were alone again for a minute or two after breakfast
before Mabel started down the path to catch the 14-1/2 o'clock 4th grade
sub-trunk line to the junction.

"What's the matter with mother?" he said.

"Oh! it's the food-stuff again: she's never got accustomed to it; she
says it doesn't suit her."

"Nothing else?"

"No, my dear, I am sure of it. She hasn't said a word lately."

Oliver watched his wife go down the path, reassured. He had been a
little troubled once or twice lately by an odd word or two that his
mother had let fall. She had been brought up a Christian for a few
years, and it seemed to him sometimes as if it had left a taint. There
was an old "Garden of the Soul" that she liked to keep by her, though
she always protested with an appearance of scorn that it was nothing but
nonsense. Still, Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it:
superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brain
weakened, might conceivably reassert itself. Christianity was both wild
and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and
impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the
exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he
knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with
hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once
entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled
strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted.
But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it again
with favour.

Oliver himself, ever sin