hers at any
point.

"I'd have liked to have Ellen marry," said Ellen's mother, "she's that
kind. Having a man of her own, most any kind of a man so as he would be
good to her, would mean such a lot. If Ellen can have a little of what
everybody's having, she's satisfied. But there are some who can get a
great deal more out of it than that ... and if they don't the rest of it
is a drag and a weariness." He left off stripping the bushes and turned
contentedly against her knees.

"You're my home, Mumsey."

"And not even," she gently insisted, "when I'm not here to make it for
you. There's a kind of life goes with loving; it's like--like the
lovely inside colour of a shell, and somehow, this winter I've wondered
if you'd got to the place where you knew what that would be like if you
should find it." She turned his face up to her with a tender anxiety and
yet with a little timidity; they did not talk much of such things in
Bloombury.

"I know, mother."

"Yes...." after a long look, "you would; you're so like your father. But
if you know, you mustn't ever be led by dullness or loneliness into
anything less, Peter. Not that I'm afraid you'll be led into anything
wrong ... but there are things that are almost more wrong than downright
wickedness....

"I've been thinking a great deal lately about when I was your age, and
there didn't seem anything for me but to marry one of the neighbour's
boys that I'd known always, or a long plain piece of school teaching. It
wasn't easy with everybody egging me on--but I stuck it out, and at the
last along came your father ... I'd like you to have something like
that, Peter,--and your son coming to you the way you came to me, like
it was through a cloud of glory...." He looked up presently on her
silence, silver tipped now with the hope of renewal, and he saw her as a
man sometimes when he is young and clean, sees his mother, the Sacred
Door ... and he did not observe at all that her hands were berry stained
and the nails broken, nor that her cheek had fallen in and her hair gray
and wispy. But being a young man and never good at talking, it made no
difference with him except that as they walked home across the pastures
he was more than ever careful of her and teased her more whimsically.

He forgot, after he had settled in his room again at Blodgett's, that
Miss Minnie Havens had ever walked with him in the purlieus of the
House, for he was quite taken up with a new set of rooms he