saw the startled pain leap into the
eyes. He did not understand the cause of her emotion, or know that he
had wakened in that strongly repressed nature the desperate hunger for
motherhood, possible only to woman at the finest and best.

She realized now why she had never forgotten her Little Boy Blue of the
Dovercourt sands. He, in his baby beauty and sweetness, had wakened
the embryo mother in the warm-hearted girl of sixteen. And now he had
come back, in the full strength of his young manhood, overflowing with
passionate ideality and romance, to teach the lonely woman of
thirty-six the true sweet meaning of love and of wifehood.

Her heart seemed to turn to marble and cease beating. She felt
helpless in her pain. Only the touch of her Little Boy Blue, or of
baby Boy Blues so like him, that they must have come trotting down the
sands of life straight from the heaven of his love and hers, could ever
still this ache at her bosom.

She looked helplessly up into his longing, glowing, boyish face--so
sweet, so young, so beautiful.

Should she put up her arms and draw it to her breast?

She had given no actual promise to the Professor. She had not
mentioned him to the Boy.

Ah, dear God! If one had waited twelve long years for a thing which
was to prove but an empty husk after all! In order not to fail the
possible expectations of another, had she any right to lay such a heavy
burden of disappointment upon her little Boy Blue? And, if she _must_
do so, how could she best help him to bear it?

"Fanks," came a brave little voice, with almost startling distinctness,
across the shore of memory; "Fanks, but I always does my own cawwying."

At last she found her voice.

"Boy dear," she said, gently; "please go now. I am tired."

Then she shut her eyes.

In a few seconds she heard the gate close, and knew the garden was
empty.

Tears slipped from between the closed lids, and coursed slowly down her
cheeks. The only right way is apt to be a way of such pain at the
moment, that even those souls possessing clearest vision and endowed
with strongest faith, are unable to hear the golden clarion-call,
sounding amid the din of present conflict: "Through much tribulation,
enter into the kingdom."

Thus hopeless tears fell in the old garden.

* * * * *

And Martha, the elderly housekeeper, faithful but curious, let fall the
lath of the green Venetian blind covering the storeroom window