"I can't," she answered quietly, "not till I'm through. For I've started now. Besides--" her eager words tumbled more gently now, "all the morning through she told me about things I didn't know--things of which I was ignorant. She thought it vairee dreadful that I did not know how to work with a flat-iron--she thought it vairee stupid that I could not manage the sewing machine--and I was ashamed because I did not know vairee much--and I would be glad if she would tell me how to do these things I do not know. Now, I know something that she does not know--" she stepped very close to the amazed woman, "something I think--she will like to hear about--" a cooing sweetness crept into Felicia's tones, the naive earnestness, the gentle candor of her appeal, silenced both the man and the woman. "She will like to hear about the way to be a mother. I know exactly the way--it's like this-- it isn't a bit like the way you do it--" her clear eyes looked straight into those of the awed person before her. "The way you do it is not at all pretty--not at all amusing--you shout and scold and fret and 'don't--don't don't'--all the time! That's not the way to be a mother!" Felicia's eyes grew tender, her hand touched the woman's hand and patted it reassuringly. "I'll tell you the vairee best way to be a mother--evairy morning you have some one make you vairee, vairee pretty with a little lace cap and a rosy pillow--you must stay in your bed and wait till your children come to see you and then you must smile at them and speak vairee softly--this way, saying 'Go out in the garden and be happy, my dears!' And when they come back to you at twilight, oh so vairee happy--" her voice wavered, she was no longer looking at them, she was looking far back across the years. She shivered a little. "That's the time for you to say, 'Ah, Felicia, you look as though you'd been vairee happy today--in your garden--" The man strode toward her eagerly. He put his hands on her heaving shoulders and dragged her toward the light. "Who are you?" he demanded sharply, "tell me quickly, who are you?" And Felicia looked at him, still dazed, still drifting happily on the flood of her beautiful memories. "Why, of course I know you--" she whispered gently, "I've been looking everywhere to find you. You're my Portia Person--only the Portia part of you is all quite lost--" CHAPTER VI THE LAST PRETENDING The Portia Person and the young lawyer bent over a long table littered with papers from the young lawyer's portfolio and the storeroom trunks. They were sitting in the young lawyer's room, the room that had been Grandy's and from the mantelpiece the portrait of Grandy's father looked down upon them. His faintly ironical smile seemed to mock their baffled efforts to disentangle the mystery. The tide wind blew in softly from the river; the lights in the quaint old gas fixtures flared waveringly, but the wide room was very still.