"If she wants you to know, my son, she will tell you herself," Madame had replied, in a tone of gentle rebuke. "I have no right to violate her confidence." He shrugged his shoulders good-humouredly. "You don't need to squelch me like that, Mother. I don't know that I care, particularly. I was merely making conversation." "Refined conversation is not made of impertinences," Madame suggested. The words were harsh, but the tone was kind. "Don't stab me with epigrams, please, for I don't believe I deserve it." [Sidenote: Dream-Children] Madame recalled every word they had said as she took down her afternoon gown of black silk, and began to sew frills of real lace in the neck and sleeves. She was glad he had been pleasant about it, for it seemed much more like living, someway, to have another woman in the house. If Virginia had lived--she, too, had brown eyes, but her hair was brown also. She would have been four years older than Edith was now, and, undoubtedly, married. All Madame's feminine ancestors for generations back had been married. The only spinster in the family, so far as Madame knew, had remained true to the memory of a dead lover. "Some women are born to be married, some achieve marriage, and others have marriage thrust upon them," Madame said to herself, unconsciously paraphrasing an old saying. Virginia would have been meant for it, too, and, by now, there would have been children in the old house, pattering back and forth upon the stairs, lisping words that meant no more than the bubbling of a fountain, and stretching up tiny hands that looked like crumpled rose-petals, pleading to be taken up and loved. These dream-children tugged strangely at the old lady's heart-strings in her moments of reverie. Even yet, after Rosemary came--but they would not be like her own flesh and blood, as a daughter's children always are. Poor Rosemary! How miserable she was at home, and how little she would need to make her happy! To think that she dared not tell her Grandmother and Aunt that she was engaged to Alden! Madame's cheeks grew warm with resentment in the girl's behalf. Motherless, friendless, alone, with Life's great cup of wonder in her rough, red hands! [Sidenote: "Fussed Over"] A tap at the door made her start. "Come in!" she called. It was Edith, trig and tailor-made, in dark green, with a crisp white linen shirtwaist, an immaculate collar, and a dashing green tie. "Mr. Marsh has invited me to go for a drive after luncheon," she said, "and he asked me to come and see if you weren't almost ready. May I do your hair for you?" Madame submitted, not because she cared to have her hair done, but because she liked to be "fussed over," as she put it. There was something very pleasant in the touch of Edith's cool, soft hands. "You're--you're not going to change the way I do it, are you?" she asked, a little anxiously. "No, indeed! I wouldn't change it for anything. It suits you just as it is."