“Ah, yes,—your mother! Mrs. Barrett, how do you do? I am,—yes, I am sure I am very much,—yes,—taken by surprise. When did you come? You must be very tired. Edith, my dear, hadn’t you better show her to her room?” He had made his speech, and, anxious to be rid of her, asked Edith to take her away; and Edith, who breathed more freely now that the worst was over, arose, and bidding her mother follow her, conducted her to the small but pleasant room adjoining Gertie’s and communicating with it by means of a door. To Edith it seemed that her mother was safer near to Gertie, while Mrs. Barrett was delighted with the arrangement, especially as Gertie signified her willingness to have the door kept open when Mrs. Barrett liked. It was known in the kitchen by this time that the soiled, jaded little woman with the queer-looking baggage was Mrs. Schuyler’s mother, and among the servants there was much talk and speculation concerning her. Had she come to stay? was she expected? was the colonel glad to see her? and what was she, anyway? Mrs. Tiffe knew all about the lodgers and the plain sewing, while the lower grade of servants knew a great deal more, and had among them a tradition that Mrs. Schuyler’s mother once sat under an umbrella in the streets of London, and sold gingerbread, and apples, and peanuts, and boot-lacings. And now she was here to be treated like Mrs. Schuyler herself, and John sniffed a little contemptuously when he went in to wait upon the family at dinner. But there was nothing to sniff at in the highly respectable-looking woman, whom Gertie had helped to dress in her best black silk, with the widow’s cap set jauntily above the snow-white puffs of hair, and the air of quiet dignity which Mrs. Barrett knew so well how to assume, even when unusually embarrassed as she was now, with so much grandeur and display around her, and Edith mistress of it all. Truly, she did a good thing when she withheld the letter which would so surely have changed her daughter’s life, she thought, when she was alone in her room that night, and free to recall the chain of events which had resulted in her being there. Edith, too, was thinking, and her thoughts kept her awake until long after midnight, when, as she was about falling away to sleep, she was startled by the sound of a groan, which seemed to come from her mother’s room, and a moment after Gertie knocked at her door, saying: “Please, Mrs. Schuyler, I think Mrs. Barrett is very sick.” In a moment Edith was out of bed and knotting the cord of her dressing-gown with trembling hands, while the colonel, also roused from his first deep sleep, and remembering Mrs. Rogers, who had gotten Edith up at midnight, wondered to himself “why these people would always persist in being sick at such inopportune times, and send for Edith to help them.”