e cause of Suzanna's listlessness, spoke no
word. She wondered why the child had lost interest in the festival,
indeed in all things pertaining to the occasion. It was difficult, she
finally decided, to know how to cope with a child so complex, so
changeable. She determined to treat the new mood with indifference, as
being the most potent method. So she asked of Suzanna the performance of
daily duties just as usual. When she discovered Suzanna gazing at her,
Maizie close beside her with the same degree of reflection in her gray
eyes, Mrs. Procter grew uncomfortable, then a trifle irritable. Both
children seemed to regard her as an alien, one, for the time, quite
outside their pale.

Suzanna, then, had taken Maizie into her confidence.

"One needs be clairvoyant," Mrs. Procter told her husband one evening,
"to know what passes through small minds."

"Clairvoyant and full of patience," he answered, looking up from his
color book. "I can remember even now my own sensations when at times my
mother failed to go with me into my land of dreams."

Mrs. Procter cast her memory back over the events of several days.

"I can't think what has so changed Suzanna," she said at last; "I've
disappointed her, I fear, about something or other. Dear me, what
insight versatile children do demand in a mother. And Suzanna takes
everything so very seriously. And Maizie stares at me too, with a little
bewildered expression. It's strange that Maizie, with all her
literalness, can understand at times Suzanna's disappointments when her
fancies are not given due value. For, of course, it is some fancy of
Suzanna's that I've either not noticed, or perhaps laughed at." She
paused to smile at her husband.

"Such children come of giving them an inventor father, an 'impractical
genius,' as I've heard myself in satire called."

She flushed up angrily at this.

"You've done wonderfully well," she said, and believed the assertion;
just as though at forty to weigh nails correctly and to sell so many
yards of garden hose a week was a fine measure of success. "And your
name will go ringing down the ages." She would never let him lose
confidence in his own powers. Circumstances alone had thrown him into a
mediocre position in a small town, but they should never hold him down.

He grew beneath her look; beneath her belief in him. And so the
conversation ended on the personal note; ended with hands clasped and
fond eyes seeing each the other's charm af