"Oh, I have money, yes. All I need. I do not misunderstand. You--you are very kind." He bowed gravely. Then, after another silence, "Of course you know that this will mean quite an absence from home, even if he should turn around and come back as soon as he reaches the other shore." He was adding savagely to himself, "As he will when he hears from me." "Yes, I know," murmured Margaret, faintly. "Have you not some elderly friend that you could have with you for a while? I am sure Victor has gone off only in a spirit of pique. He was always impulsive and headstrong. If you could ask some such person--" She shook her head. "I am very much alone," she said. Her childish helplessness would have touched a stone. "You see I have no relatives. And Mrs. Kirtley (I am sure she would have come) is ill." She was twisting the telegram with nervous fingers, feeling again that mad desire to scream. She felt sure she would do so if he spoke another sympathetic word. He turned his eyes away. "I really think you should have some older woman with you, other than your maid--just now." "My maid is gone," she said, a lump rising in her throat--repeating, "It--leaves me--very much alone." "That settles it," he said. "I shall send my housekeeper to you from Elmhurst. She is reliable and kind. You can depend upon her fully. She has always lived with us, and there is nothing she likes so well as to mother people." Her chin quivered like a child's. "I--I think I _need_ mothering," she said. He beat a hasty retreat. Her helplessness wrung his heart. * * * * * Two hours later Mammy Cely presented herself before Margaret--rotund of figure, dark and shining of face, thick-lipped and flat-nosed. But in her kind eyes was the brooding spirit of motherhood. Mammy Cely was of the old school. As she stood there in her clean dark gingham, white apron, white head handkerchief, and a three-cornered piece of like immaculateness crossing her breast, she was the embodiment of a past civilization, an archaic reminder of the old régime which everybody condemns, which nobody wants revived, but which has its sacred memories of friendships between high and low, that come, as all memories do, only to those who have experienced in the far past that for which the memory stands. To Margaret this humble friend was a gift from Heaven. But all this time Mammy Cely was unobtrusively taking in the situation.