y luxury or great pleasure to come into her own
life.

But two years ago a queer thing had happened to her. In an idle hour
she wrote a comical squib and sent it to a New York paper. As
everybody knows, fun, even vulgar fun, sells high in the market. Her
fun was not vulgar, but coarse and biting enough to tickle the ears of
the common reader. The editor offered her a salary equal to her whole
income for a weekly column of such fooling.

She had hoarded every penny of this money. With it she meant to pay
her expenses in Europe and to support George in his year at Oxford.
The work and the salary were to go on while she was gone.

It was easy enough to hide all of these things from her son while he
was in Cambridge and she in Delaware. But now? What if he should find
out that his mother was the "Quigg" of the New York ----, a paper which
he declared to be unfit for a gentleman to read?

She was looking out to sea and thinking of this when her cousin, Miss
Vance, came up to her. Miss Vance was a fashionable teacher in New
York, who was going to spend a year abroad with two wealthy pupils.
She was a thin woman, quietly dressed; white hair and black brows, with
gold eye-glasses bridging an aquiline nose, gave her a commanding,
inquisitorial air.

"Well, Frances!" she began briskly, "I have not had time before to
attend to you. Are your bags hung in your stateroom?"

"I haven't been down yet," said Mrs. Waldeaux meekly. "We were
watching the fog in the sun."

"Fog! Mercy on me! You know you may be ill any minute, and your room
not ready! Of course, you did not take the bromides that I sent you a
week ago?

"No, Clara."

Miss Vance glanced at her. "Well, just as you please. I've done what
I could. Let me look at your itinerary. You will be too ill for me to
advise you about it later."

"Oh, we made none!" said George gayly, coming up to his mother's aid.
"We are going to be vagabonds, and have no plans. Mother's soul draws
us to York Cathedral, and mine to the National Gallery. That is all we
know."

"I thought you had given up that whim of being an artist?" said Miss
Vance, sharply facing on him.

Young Waldeaux reddened. "Yes, I have given it up. I know as well as
you do that I have no talent. I am going to study my profession at
Oxford, and earn my bread by it."

"Quite right. You never would earn it by art," she said decisively.
"How long do you stay in York, Frances?"

"Oh, a day,