ere is to be said on a subject, and again crossed the room toward
the door. Her mother drifted aimlessly in that direction also, as though
swept along by the other's energy.

"Well, it's a pity he is not here now, anyhow," she said, adding in a
spirited answer to her daughter's expression, "Now, you needn't look
that way, Marietta. You know yourself that Lydia is very romantic and
fanciful. It would be a very different matter if she were like Madeleine
Hollister. She wouldn't need any managing."

Mrs. Mortimer smiled at the idea. "Yes, I'd like to see somebody try to
manage Paul's sister," she commented.

"They wouldn't _have_ to," her mother pointed out, "she's so
levelheaded and sane. But Lydia's different. It's part of her
loveliness, of course, only you do have to manage her. And she'll be in
a very unsettled state for the first week or two after she gets home
after such a long absence. The impressions she gets then--well, I wish
he were here!"

Mrs. Mortimer waved her hand toward the roses.

"Of course, of course," assented her mother, subsiding peaceably down
the scale from anxiety to confidence with the phrase. She looked at the
monstrous flowers with the gaze of acquired admiration so usual in her
eyes. "They don't look much like roses, do they?" she remarked
irrelevantly.

Mrs. Mortimer turned in the doorway, her face expressing an extreme
surprise. "Good gracious, no," she cried. "Why, of course not. They cost
a dollar and a half apiece."

She did not stop to hear her mother's vaguely assenting reply. Mrs.
Emery heard her firm, rapid tread go down the hall to the front door and
then suddenly stop. Something indefinable about the pause that followed
made the mother's heart beat thickly. "What is it, Marietta?" she
called, but her voice was lost in Mrs. Mortimer's exclamation of
surprise, "Why it can't be--why, _Lydia_!"

As from a great distance, the mother heard a confused rush in the hall,
and then, piercing through the dreamlike unreality of the moment, came
the sweet, high note of a girl's voice, laughing, but with the liquid
uncertainty of tears quivering through the mirth. "Oh, Marietta! Where's
Mother? Aren't you all slow-pokes--not a soul to meet us at the
train--where's Mother? Where's Mother? Where's--" The room swam around
Mrs. Emery as she stood up looking toward the door, and the girl who
came running in, her dark eyes shining with happy tears, was not more
real than the many visions of h