cross the table at her son.

"From Maria Ansell--they are all coming tomorrow."

"Ah--that's good," Amherst rejoined. "I should have been sorry if Cicely
had not been here."

"Mr. Langhope is coming too," his mother continued. "I'm glad of that,
John."

"Yes," Amherst again assented.

The morrow was to be a great day at Westmore. The Emergency Hospital,
planned in the first months of his marriage, and abandoned in the
general reduction of expenditure at the mills, had now been completed on
a larger and more elaborate scale, as a memorial to Bessy. The strict
retrenchment of all personal expenses, and the leasing of Lynbrook and
the town house, had enabled Amherst, in eighteen months, to lay by
enough income to carry out this plan, which he was impatient to see
executed as a visible commemoration of his wife's generosity to
Westmore. For Amherst persisted in regarding the gift of her fortune as
a gift not to himself but to the mills: he looked on himself merely as
the agent of her beneficent intentions. He was anxious that Westmore and
Hanaford should take the same view; and the opening of the Westmore
Memorial Hospital was therefore to be performed with an unwonted degree
of ceremony.

"I am glad Mr. Langhope is coming," Mrs. Amherst repeated, as they rose
from the table. "It shows, dear--doesn't it?--that he's really
gratified--that he appreciates your motive...."

She raised a proud glance to her tall son, whose head seemed to tower
higher than ever above her small proportions. Renewed self-confidence,
and the habit of command, had in fact restored the erectness to
Amherst's shoulders and the clearness to his eyes. The cleft between the
brows was gone, and his veiled inward gaze had given place to a glance
almost as outward-looking and unspeculative as his mother's.

"It shows--well, yes--what you say!" he rejoined with a slight laugh,
and a tap on her shoulder as she passed.

He was under no illusions as to his father-in-law's attitude: he knew
that Mr. Langhope would willingly have broken the will which deprived
his grand-daughter of half her inheritance, and that his subsequent show
of friendliness was merely a concession to expediency. But in his
present mood Amherst almost believed that time and closer relations
might turn such sentiments into honest liking. He was very fond of his
little step-daughter, and deeply sensible of his obligations toward her;
and he hoped that, as Mr. Langhope came to recogn