Then came self-reproach. He remembered with hot cheeks that he had actually joked with Ellery about her in early days, and let himself be bantered in return--cad that he was, incapable of appreciating at first sight the woman he was to love. He had thought her an exquisite trifle, almost too illusive to be taken seriously. Now that very illusiveness was the thing that gripped him closest, like poetry and music and all the finer elements of life, the most impossible to explain, the most supreme in their dominion. Beauty meant all this. He found himself repeating, "Beauty is truth. Truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." And Lena was beautiful. How beautiful! He trembled in flesh and spirit at the vision of her face turned up to him out of the black November darkness, at the memory of the fine texture of her cheeks and lips. He did not stop to ask himself whether he and Keats were agreed in their definition of beauty. Moreover, poor Keats never had the delight of anything so pink and golden and blue-eyed as Lena Quincy. CHAPTER XIII AN AWAKENING A little scrawl of a note, delivered just after breakfast at Mr. Elton's door, brought Madeline to visit Mrs. Percival, who, like her mother, seemed to be in continual need of her. She found that lady lying in her favorite chair in the library--the chair that had been her refuge in the days of her early widowhood, that had comfortably housed her when books carried her away from her own world of sorrows and problems into the world of illusions, the chair in which she had dreamed of the great things that were to come into a younger life, not her own, and yet deeply her own,--her son's. Now she lay back in it with clasped hands, thinner than usual and with eyes sadder. Madeline came in like a young Hebe, glowing with health and vigor, and infinitely tender toward fragility. "You are ill, dear mother Percival," cried the girl, dropping to her knees and slipping an arm behind her friend's back in an unconscious attitude of protection. Mrs. Percival's fingers followed the soft curve that the girl's hair made around her forehead. "No, dear," she said slowly, "but I had something to tell you. I wanted to speak to you myself, before any one else had the chance." "Please tell me quickly." "So many of my dearest hopes have come to nothing!" Mrs. Percival went on, with a little bitterness that Madeline thought unlike her. "Each blow, as it falls, seems the hardest to bear. I've tried to accept whatever happens, graciously. It isn't always easy, Madeline, dear." "Yes?" said Madeline. "Dick--" "Is anything the matter with Dick?" Madeline rose with a little cry. "Dick does not think so," his mother answered. "My child, you have seen something of this little Miss Quincy?" Madeline's eyes dropped for the tenth of a second and a heaviness took possession of her body; then she lifted her head bravely.