s against the crochet of her
yoke and she could hear his sobs with her heart.

* * * * *

Miraculously, like an amoeba reaching out to inclose unto itself, the
circle opened with a gasp of astonishment that filled Mrs. Peopping's O
to its final stretch and took unto its innermost Emma Jett.

Nor did she wear her initiation lightly. There was a new tint out in her
long cheeks, and now her chair, a rocker, was but one removed from Mrs.
Peopping's.

Oh, the long, sweet afternoons over garments that made needlework
sublime. No longer the padded rose on the centerpiece or the futile
doily, but absurd little dresses with sleeves that she measured to the
length of her hand, and yokes cut out to the pattern of a playing card,
and all fretted over with feather-stitching that was frailer than
maidenhair fern and must have cost many an eye-ache, which, because of
its source, was easy to bear.

And there happened to Mrs. Jett that queer juvenescence that sometimes
comes to men and women in middle life. She who had enjoyed no particular
youth (her father had died in a ferryboat crash two weeks before her
birth, and her mother three years after) came suddenly to acquire
comeliness which her youth had never boasted.

The round-shouldered, long-cheeked girl had matured gingerly to rather
sparse womanhood that now at forty relented back to a fulsome thirty.

Perhaps it was the tint of light out in her face, perhaps the splendor
of the vision; but at any rate, in those precious months to come, Mrs.
Jett came to look herself as she should have looked ten years back.

They were timid and really very beautiful together, she and Henry Jett.
He came to regard her as a vase of porcelain, and, in his ignorance,
regarded the doctor's mandates harsh; would not permit her to walk, but
ordered a hansom cab every day from three to four, Mrs. Jett alternating
punctiliously with each of the boarding-house ladies for driving
companion.

Every noon, for her delectation at luncheon, he sent a boy from the
store with a carton of her special favorites--Blue Point oysters. She
suddenly liked them small because, as she put it, they went down easier,
and he thought that charming. Lynnhavens for mortals of tougher growth.

Long evenings they spent at names, exercising their pre-determination
as to sex. "Ann" was her choice, and he was all for canceling his
preference for "Elizabeth," until one morning she awakened to t