“No, Jack, not ashamed,” she said. “But I had to talk to you about it. I have thought of nothing else since I saw you yesterday. You go back to-morrow, do you not?” “Yes.” “Then say good-bye to your father before you go. I must leave you; I have an evening class. Good-bye, my dear.” She kissed him with a tenderness that was new to her, and left him. But it is not in the nature of those who have lived in a groove lightly to get out of it. Habit becomes nature, and to look permanently at one view would, no doubt, if continued for forty years, tend to make the observer believe that the world contained no other. This was the case with Mrs. Collingwood. Her humanized interview with Jack had jolted her as a stone on the line may jolt a train for a moment without causing it to leave the metals. The direction in which it had been running, its speed, and its weight have all to be overcome, and with her long-continued convictions had given her great momentum, and an address she delivered three days afterward at a Mothers’ Union showed no speck of apostasy. CHAPTER XIII Jeannie threw herself into the life of the place with amazing energy, and she had her hands very full. In the first place, the house in Bolton Street had a new inhabitant--none other than the baby of Frank Bennett. It had occurred to Arthur when Jack was telling him about it that here was a possible situation, at any rate for the present, and before a week had elapsed he had written to Jack to say that if he wished they would give the child a home as long as the present _régime_ of Bolton Street continued. Jack had accepted the offer with the most thankful alacrity: to live there was much better for the child; also (this he hardly admitted to himself) he could run down with reasonable frequency to see how it throve. Jeannie had wanted no persuading, and Miss Fortescue hardly more. She had opposed the scheme at first on the same grounds as she opposed everything, in order to see how the thing looked from the other side. That such a plan was somewhat out of the way, and that it would give Wroxton a good deal to talk about, she did not consider at all a disadvantage to them, and a distinct benefit to Wroxton. “We shall hear less of the S. P. C. K.,” she remarked. The baby was to Jeannie of absorbing interest. The same instinct which had led her when a child to make dramatic the lives of her dolls, and to watch over them with an anxious benignity of which saw-dust and wax were really not worthy, had here a sort of fruition. A doll had come to life, the inventions of her childhood were being played over again in the theatre of living, her play was become true. Arthur, who was the youngest of them, was only a year younger than herself; she had thus never known a baby in the house, and she found an ineffable charm in it.