the girl who had smiled over Bertie Willis' love-making, because she
didn't know that such things happened except in books--as he was from
the old Rodney. Even Violet had seen, in the glimpse she'd caught across
two taxicabs, that her smile was somehow different, and James Randolph
had come back from his tea with her in the Knickerbocker, saying that
she was a thousand years old.

So it was not wonderful that Rodney should have found a new mystery in
her; nor that, seeing in her look, sometimes--especially when it was not
meeting his own--the reflections of a thousand experiences he had not
shared with her, he should have felt that she was a long way off. And
his heart ached for the old Rose, whom he had so completely
"surrounded"--the Rose who had consulted him about the menus for her
dinners, who had brought him all her little troubles; who had
tried--bless her!--to study law, and had stolen into court to hear his
argument, so that she could talk with him. Whatever the future might
have for him, it would never bring that Rose back.

The arrival of the twins, in the convoy of a badly flustered--and, to
tell the truth, a somewhat scandalized--Miss French, simplified the
situation a little--by complicating it! They absolutely enforced a
routine. They had needs that must be met on the minute. And they gave
Rose and Rodney so many occupations that the contemplation of their
complicated states of mind was much abridged.

But even her babies brought Rose a disappointment along with them. From
the time of the receipt of Miss French's telegram acknowledging Rodney's
and telling them what train she and the twins would take, Rose had been
telling off the hours in mounting excitement. The two utterly adorable
little creatures, as the pictures of them in Rodney's pocketbook showed
them to be, who were, miraculously--incredibly--hers, were coming to
bring motherhood to her; a long-deferred payment for the labor and the
agony with which she had borne them; the realization of half-forgotten
hopes that had, during the period of her pregnancy, been the mainstay of
her life. There was now no Mrs. Ruston, no Harriet, no plausible
physician to keep them away from her. Rose had a smile of tender pity
for the memory of the girl who had struggled so ineffectually and yet
with such heart-breaking earnestness to break the filaments of the web
they'd spun around her.

No, it wouldn't be like that now. Rodney had agreed explicitly that
Miss