"Eustace and I are coming to sit with you awhile, Richard, for you two must be better acquainted," she said to him; and with the blindness that is a part of love, neither she nor Eustace saw that their coming was unwelcome. Before they left, Joscelyn had slipped away, carrying his question and its answer in her heart. But before she went to bed, she opened the box where she kept her treasures, and kneeling in front of her fire, laid upon the glowing embers the scarlet sash of an officer in the king's service. "I have no right to keep you any longer," she whispered, as the silk cracked and crinkled, and passed away in a smoke-fringed flame; "no right, for now I know, I know!" The quiet of the town was now frequently broken; for as February drew to a close, some of the soldiers began to straggle home, some on furlough, some on dismissal. Billy Bryce, hungry for the toothsome things in his mother's pantry and impatient for a sight of the yellow curls that sunned themselves on Janet's head, came first. But ten minutes spent in that young woman's company so dampened his spirits, that for days his mother's utmost efforts in culinary arts failed to tempt him. Janet knew the very hour of his arrival, and she also knew that it was two hours before he came to seek her. She could not know that his stay with his mother had been as unwilling as it was dutiful; so to complicate matters a little more she had gone out to pay some calls that might have waited a month. But he found her at last on Joscelyn's porch, her hands in her muff, her curls bobbing from under her hood to the fur-trimmed tippet below, where the winter sunshine seemed to gather itself into a focus. He waved to her from halfway down the square, but she only squinted up her eyes as in a vain effort at recognition. "Well, I declare," she exclaimed patronizingly, as he sprang eagerly up the steps, "if it isn't Mistress Bryce's little Billy! Why, Billy, child, you must have grown quite an inch since you went away. How is your dear mother to-day?" Her tone and manner were indescribably superior, as though she were talking to a child of six, so that the amazed and abashed boy, instead of hugging her in his long arms as he wanted to, took the tips of the little fingers she put out to him, and stammeringly and solicitously asked if she had been quite well since he saw her last. She said it was a long time to remember, but she would do the best she could, and immediately began to count off on her fingers the number of headaches and toothaches she had had in the past two years; until Joscelyn, sorry for the boy's unprovoked misery, stopped her abruptly, and finally sent Billy across the street to pour out his disappointment to Richard. "Janet, you little barbarian, you have no heart!" "Oh, yes I have," replied that imperturbable young woman; "I have a great big heart for a grown man, but you see I do not particularly care for children who are still dangling at their mother's apron string."