st be content with that, then," she said, smiling.

"We are," said Michael.

Lady Barbara waited a moment without speaking.

"And your mother?" she asked.

He shook his head.

"She still refuses to see me," he said. "She still thinks it was I who
made the plot to take her away and shut her up. She is often angry with
me, poor darling, but--but you see it isn't she who is angry: it's just
her malady."

"Yes, my dear," said Lady Barbara. "I am so glad you see it like that."

"How else could I see it? It was my real mother whom I began to know
last Christmas, and whom I was with in town for the three months that
followed. That's how I think of her: I can't think of her as anything
else."

"And how is she otherwise?"

Again he shook his head.

"She is wretched, though they say that all she feels is dim and veiled,
that we mustn't think of her as actually unhappy. Sometimes there are
good days, when she takes a certain pleasure in her walks and in looking
after a little plot of ground where she gardens. And, thank God, that
sudden outburst when she tried to kill me seems to have entirely passed
from her mind. They don't think she remembers it at all. But then the
good days are rare, and are growing rarer, and often now she sits doing
nothing at all but crying."

Aunt Barbara laid her hand on him.

"Oh, my dear," she said.

Michael paused for a moment, his brown eyes shining.

"If only she could come back just for a little to what she was in
January," he said. "She was happier then, I think, than she ever was
before. I can't help wondering if anyhow I could have prolonged those
days, by giving myself up to her more completely."

"My dear, you needn't wonder about that," said Aunt Barbara. "Sir James
told me that it was your love and nothing else at all that gave her
those days."

Michael's lips quivered.

"I can't tell you what they were to me," he said, "for she and I found
each other then, and we both felt we had missed each other so much and
so long. She was happy then, and I, too. And now everything has
been taken from her, and still, in spite of that, my cup is full to
overflowing."

"That's how she would have it, Michael," said Barbara.

"Yes, I know that. I remind myself of that."

Again he paused.

"They don't think she will live very long," he said. "She is getting
physically much weaker. But during this last week or two she has been
less unhappy, they think. They say some new change may