Kate stood gazing after them as wistfully as Mag, both following with their thoughts two happy young adventurers into a happy world forever closed to themselves. "You'd like to be going to a ball yourself, wouldn't you?" said she, to the girl beside her. "Would I? Oh, my Gawd! _Would_ I?" gasped Mag, and ran into the house. The repressed intensity of the reply startled Mrs. Kildare. She looked at Philip. "Did you hear that? I wonder if the girl isn't happy here." The past few months had done a great deal for Mag Henderson's body, whatever they had accomplished for her soul. Maternity had developed her lissome figure into beautiful lines; health, the result of care and good feeding, colored her lips and her cheeks and her pretty, shallow eyes; she had learned not only the trick of dressing becomingly, but of keeping her hair, her hands, and her feet as neat as those of a lady. Even her voice had lost something of its uncouth drawl, and its lazy softness had a charm of its own. She was very imitative. For some time Philip had been aware that his lady's protégée was developing into an attractive young woman. "You say she seems devoted to the child?" he asked thoughtfully. "I think so, yes. She is always making clothes for the baby, and playing with it, and petting it--when Jacqueline will let her. But,"--Kate sighed faintly--"maternity isn't enough for all women, it seems." It was such remarks as this that gave Philip his strong hope for the future. But now he put himself aside to consider the problem of Mag Henderson. From the first he had foreseen that it was not a problem to be handled as simply as Kate thought to handle it. The psychological instinct of the priest was very strong in him--doubtless there had been many a good curé of souls among past generations of Benoixes, professing an older faith than his. In moments of clear vision that came to him he battled, as all thinkers must battle, with a great discouragement, a sense of helplessness that was almost terrifying. Of what use man's puny human endeavors against the forces of predestination arrayed against him--the forces of heredity, temperament, opportunity? Mag Henderson cost him a wakeful night; and from her his thoughts kept straying oddly and unaccountably to Jacqueline, little Jacqueline, his playmate and pupil and chum, with her mischievous, daredevil impulses and her generous heart. He jerked his thoughts back angrily to poor Mag Henderson. Why should he bracket the two together thus, the one a weed shooting up in a neglected fence corner, the other the loveliest and most lovingly tended blossom in a garden?--why, indeed, except that both were come, weed and flower alike, to the period of their blooming. CHAPTER XXI