“Yes, my love,” Mrs. Baines said, and her eyes filled with tears, “I hope so too, and that I may make him happy.” She was silent for a minute, and then it seemed as if what she said were forced from her. “I wanted to tell you,” she began with a little gasp, “I want you to know something in my past life, so that you may better understand the reason of what I am doing. When I was a girl, Florence, a very true love was given to me. I won it heedlessly, and did not know its value. I played with it and threw it away—a fresh young life like Alfred Wimple’s. It was in my power to make him happy; but I made him miserable. He was taken ill and died. Sometimes I think that I am answerable to God for the loss of that life; had I acted differently it might have been in the world now. I never had a young love offered to me again; I thought that God had denied it to me as a punishment; for Mr. Baines’s youth had gone when I married him; it was the marriage of his middle age. But through all the years I have not grown old, and all things that have youth in them are precious to me. One reason why I love you all—you, and Walter and the children—is that I am young too, at heart. It is only the lines on my face that make me look old, and the years I can count that make me feel so. I am young still in all else.” She stopped for a moment, as if waiting for some response, but Florence could think of nothing to say; she looked at the old lady wonderingly, and put her hand on the nervous ones that rested on the chair-back. “I remember the night of your party,” Mrs. Baines went on. “I thought of the past all the evening while I sat there—your guest, my darling—it came back again and again, it enveloped me, one year after another. I went on to the balcony, and all my dear ones who had gone gathered round me in the darkness. I heard your fresh young voices behind, but the years had set a mark on me that cut me off from you, and death had taken most of those I remembered, but left my heart young and longing for love, longing to live again just as you loved and as you lived. I said to myself, ‘I am old, I am old!’ Alfred Wimple was standing by me, and whispered, ‘You are not old.’ He was like my dead come back, like the one who had loved me when I was young; I felt as if through all the years I had been waiting by a dead man’s side, but that now perhaps out of his life that loved me this other had grown, or else that God had sent him, my dear one, into the world again to love me once more, and to prove I was forgiven. Do you understand, Florence? I could not refuse the beautiful life that was laid at my feet, the love that has come to bless me once more after all the long years. We are young man and young woman to each other, and we love each other with all our hearts. It is like you and your dear Walter. I wanted to say this to you; I thought it would help you to understand, to sympathize with me. You cannot be sorry that I am going