leather frame, added something to the cheerful asceticism of the room.

Lucilla stood before the glass arranging her hair with little deft fingers. Rosa was pouring out hot water and indicating soap and towels in the meanwhile, and they were trying to talk, spasmodically.

"Oh! What good people, what fearfully overwhelmingly good people! What shall I do? What shall I talk about?" thought Lucilla. She turned away from the glass and met Rosa's critical eyes. A Persian cat invited to sup with a party of well-trained terriers, to whom cat-hunting is at other times a legitimate pastime, might feel as Lucilla felt. Then the gong sounded, banged by the vigorous Theresa, who

was resplendent in new cap and

apron.

Lucilla took her place, glanced at her miter-like napkin, the table decorations, and felt, even as she glanced, the chill creep round her soul. She realized all that had been done for her, the preparations, the scouring, the polishing. But she felt the spiritual atmosphere charged with laborious effort. Her mother-in-law of the future was full of anxiety for her comfort and amusement; she and Rosa talked with determination. They chose her subjects, music, games, theatricals, and spun from them a little catechism of questions, yet all the time Lucilla sank deeper into the snowdrift of despair. So these were her people, and always, always they would be kind and respectable and dutiful. They were as alien to her as the negro is to the Teuton. She did not speak their language or think their thoughts. The atmosphere they created was one in which she could not breathe. They made dry land for her, poor little stranded fish.

As for Laurence he was shy and absent-minded. He did not eat much, and he seemed scarcely to notice her. LIVING AGE, VOL. VIII, No. 374.

But the function went to its bitter end, dreary as only an ill-assorted dinner-party can be.

Lucilla had no conversation of the sort that Christina understood by this title, but still she made her effort. She uttered a few remarks, and answered their questions, and looked mournfully at her plate.

"Stupid little owl," thought Rosa. "What can he see in her?”

"Why? why? why?" thought Christina. "Oh! God forgive me. The poor child is shy; she'll be very different when I really know her."

They had consumed dates, bananas and Chinese figs, and sustained some weary conversation, when, with a little sigh, Christina rose.

"We'll have coffee in the drawingroom," she said; "mine can wait for me; I have a letter to write for this evening's post. Laurence, dear, take care of Lucilla for me."

She laid a kind plump hand on the girl's shoulder.

Her thoughts ran on

"After

all, I felt like that once, shy and stiff and miserable, and I wasn't in love. I wonder is she? Oh! she must be with my Laurence; how could she help it?"

Rosa, with obvious tact, retired to the garden to talk to the Browns across the wall. Laurence and Lucilla were alone in the drawing-room with the coffee cups. He drew her to him. "Poor baby! It is an ordeal for you."

Lucilla clung to him. She liked his arms round her, his face against hers. Had he been a stranger she would have liked it just as much. He was a man, and therefore she liked his caresses as a cat values the stroking hypnotic touch on back and head. She threw back her head on his shoulder, and he kissed with passion the pretty white throat.

Ah! that was not duty. Laurence

at least had some touch of vehement ardor. Once more she could breathe and understand. "They are so good," she murmured; "are you good, Laurie boy?"

"No, of course not, if you don't want me to be."

"Oh! Fie! What would your mamma say?"

"What do you mean by good?"

"I mean-temperate. They would be shocked if one laughed loud or screamed or had a very good time."

"Nonsense, baby. Why, mother your personality must have

says scope."

"Did she? Yes, she is kind. She is trying all the time to be kind, but she can't forget that I'm taking her boy away from her."

"Rubbish, dear; I only love her the more because I love you."

"Laurie, would you love me if I were bad?"

"Would I? Oh! yes.

I'm a silly

fool; I'd love you if it broke my heart and damned me."

"Why?"

"I just can't help it."

"I like that. It's not just duty and pity and all those dull feelings?"

Laurence pressed his mouth to hers. "Is it?" he asked.

"No-that's the real thing." "You wouldn't let anyone else kiss you like that, Lucilla?" he asked fiercely. "No not."

not now, no, of course

Her dark eyes shone. Her beauty, pale and lifeless at dinner time, was now kindled.

"I want to live," she said, "to live every minute. I think I'm a drunkard where life is concerned; I loathe existence."

"You shall live if I can make money. I promise you I'm working hard. We'll travel, you shall have pretty clothes, and see and be seen."

"Yes, we'll go to hot places where people are lazy and careless and happy, won't we, Laurie, places where people don't need heaps of clothes nd morals?"

"What a little Oriental you ar he said; "you've got the sun in your blood."

She sat down on his knee, and they drank their coffee and smoked their cigarettes and made a foolish dialogue between their kisses, and all the time any other might have been in Laurence's place for all Lucilla cared, except for that uncomfortable tiresome sense of gratitude which she had to feel to him. That was burdensome. It is so much easier to give than to receive, and the grateful are generally among the elect, such as the poor, who lack among other things the luxury of being benefactors.

Christina came in, and they rose laughing.

"Come, Lucilla," she said, "I'll show you my treasures. You are the only woman I can admit to this privilege, but my treasure is yours now, my dear."

Laurence looked profoundly embarrassed.

"Oh! mother dear, is it my first curl, and my first tooth, and my first letter home? If so, I really must go upstairs."

"Very well, my son, go. And here's Rosa, she shall play for us while we nod our heads over my collection."

Laurence thought, "Why will mother do it? It's not Lucilla's style. She is not maternal and she will be bored. I wish mother wouldn't."

But Christina knew one thing about life, namely, that a woman who loves a man loves always the child in him, that she is stirred to infinite tenderness by the relics and memories of his childhood that she did not know. She loves the little boy that was for the sake of the man that is.

So the mother produced her carved sandal-wood box and took out its scented treasures, the shorn fair hair when Laurence put aside the flowing locks of infancy, his first present to her, a bead necklace threaded with laborious art, a prayer book inscribed to "My Dear Motther from her sonn," a packet of his letters from school, too heartbreaking to read aloud even now (only the envelopes of these were exhibited), some quite futurist drawings, and a poem, written at the age of eight, on the mutability of life and the inevitable nature of the grave. At all these things Lucilla smiled, turning them over with careless white fingers.

"What a lot you thought of him," she said; "I suppose mothers always do."

Christina flushed a little; she had been boasting of Laurence's precocious abilities under cover of Rosa's playing (Rosa was conscientiously making headway through the Grieg Wedding March; she had learned it at school and never wholly forgotten it).

Then followed a display of photographs of Laurence at every age and with every expression from sulky solemnity to smiling fatuity. In family groups with his parents he appeared, in long clothes, in short clothes, in his first knickerbockers, holding a gun or a toy rabbit, in a sailor suit on a mast, in velveteens in a swing.

Christina had made certain that the velveteen suit photograph would stir Lucilla to envy. She had prepared to sacrifice it to the future wife.

In the imaginary rehearsal of this evening (what vast diversity always between rehearsal and fact!) Lucilla had gazed with ardent eyes at this picture, had lingered over it, saying, "If I could get another . . .”

In reality Lucilla turned the page quickly. "Oh! that's you, isn't it,

Mrs. Travis, with a full skirt and bustle; how funny it looks, doesn't it?"

"It does," Christina responded; "there, dear, you'll be tired now of photographs. Don't you sing and play?"

Rosa was pounding out Beethoven's Funeral March, the next item on her program. Lucilla admitted that she sang. She had a very small voice, but she used it well. When she was singing Laurence came in. They had a little more music and a rubber of whist, and so the evening ended.

When the door had closed upon the future husband and wife, Christina rose and wrapped up her relics of the past. She and Rosa were silent for a time. Then Rosa burst out, "What fools men are!"

"Hush, dear. We must not criticise. It's not fair, "it's too soon ... besides, she's very pretty and I'm sure she behaved very nicely. If she loves him... that is all I ask."

"If she loves him-"

"I don't think she does. I'm afraid not, Rosa. She took no interest in the things I told her. it might have been any child. No, love is not like that."

Rosa stood erect, her eyes grew luminous.

"Love! Why, she doesn't even know love by sight as as Jack and I know it. But I think no one ever did care as we do."

Christina sighed. She looked old and faded in the glare of incandescent light. "Laurence must go his own way," she said. "I cannot keep him at my apron strings; I can neither warn nor save him. Men will be men, Rosa; besides it may be all right." CHAPTER VIII.

Christina made but one effort to avert the inevitable of her son's marriage. There had come upon her a

sense of passivity. The old life was breaking up. The current of fate was carrying her along towards loneliness, old age, and that last adventure, death. It has been shown in this chronicle that Christina was a commonplace woman, a unit in that vast army of sober matrons who live and die unnoticed. She was neither rebel nor visionary nor charmer. Out of such stuff the Creator makes no Jeanne d'Arc nor Catherine of Siena, and the Devil scarcely considers it material for a Pompadour or a Montespan. Christina had only, as the commonplace often have, a large supply of patience. She could be passively unhappy with a cheerful face.

First there came the genuine agony of Rosa's departure, the last day, the packing, the terrible waiting for the cab. Rosa and she had clung heartbroken for a minute and then Christina had found herself alone in the quiet sunny dining-room, crying softly. Yes, that was inevitable. She must dry her eyes and be cheerful and serene, when Laurence came back from Liverpool where he had gone with Rosa.

Laurence came back, and he and his mother had a comfortable little dinner at the small table in the diningroom. They are both conscientiously cheerful, and when the meal was over Laurence smoked his pipe in the drawing-room and begged his mother to play to him.

He looked the picture of easy serenity as he lolled in his chair, but his mind was ill at ease for he had resolved to embark on one of those family discussions which so painfully rend in twain the curtain of daily reticence.

"Mater," he said abruptly, as Christina took up her knitting and sat down near the fire.

"Well, dear?"

"Only this, I must be thinking of my own marriage now."

"Of course, Laurence. I wanted to speak of it."

"I must be thinking of a house. Now the question is this. Will you come and live with us in a new house or shall we come and live here with you?”

Christina was silent for some seconds. She flushed painfully and swallowed before she spoke.

"Neither, dear. You and Lucilla will live alone in your own house or flat. There is no question about it. Don't hurt me by going over the argument. It is better so."

Laurence sat up and looked at his mother.

"I will not leave you alone. I can't imagine the house without you. Why shouldn't you and Lucilla get along together?"

Christina shook her head.

"No. The young have a duty to the young. Your duty is to her. That is Nature's way, and Nature knows best. I shall be better quietly by myself with Theresa, unless of course you need Theresa, when I could look out for another. You see, Laurence, I am getting older every day. I should be tired and worried by social gaieties, perhaps even by children in a small house. One must face these things; it is the physical change that involves the spiritual one. No one will love her grandchildren more than I shall, but I shall not in a few years be fit for much noise or anxiety. I shall have crystallized into an old lady with her habits and her fads. It would be sad for us all to realize the mistake later and to change then. Let the change come now. There are some nice little new houses that would just do for Theresa and me. We shall live so quietly that I can allow you and Rosa fifteen pounds a year each, a very small sum, dear, but it will help a little.”