Raymond heard in silence my account of the doings on the Atlantic shore: only a wry twist of the mouth and a flare of the nostrils. But as the weeks went on, and still no Albert, his anger became articulate. "I shall teach her that an agreement is an agreement," he declared. "She will never try this again." Albert finally came home, three weeks late; his mother brought him herself. The governess transferred him from the hands of one parent to those of the other; and Raymond had asked my presence for that moment, as a sort of moral urge. "Who knows," he asked, "what delay she may try for next?" He gave one look at the picturesque, if not fantastic, toggery of his restored child. "Did you ever see anything like that?" he said scornfully; and I foresaw a sacrificial bonfire--or its equivalent--with Albert presently clothed in sane autumn garb. Albert was followed, within a week, by a letter from his mother. This was diffuse and circumlocutory, like the first. But its general sense was clear. If Raymond was thinking of putting Albert into a boarding-school.... "There she goes again!" exclaimed the exacerbated father. "A matter with which, by hard-and-fast agreement, she has absolutely nothing to do!" However, if he was thinking of a boarding-school.... "A child barely seven!" cried Raymond. "Why, half of them will hardly consider one of eight!" Still, if he was thinking--well, Mrs. McComas knew of a charming one, an old-established one, one in which the head-master's wife, a delightful, motherly soul.... And it was just within the Wisconsin line, not forty miles from town.... "I see her camping at the gate!" said Raymond bitterly. "Or taking a house there. Or spending months at a hotel near by. Constantly fussing round the edge of things. Running in on every visitors' day...." "Likely enough," I said. "A mother's a mother." "Well," rejoined Raymond, "the boy _shall_ go to school--in another year. But the school will be a good deal more than forty miles from here--no continual week-end trips. And it will not be in a town that has an endurable hotel--that ought to be easy to arrange, in this part of the world. No, it won't be near any town at all. I don't suppose she would take a--tent?" he queried sardonically. "To some mothers the blue tent of heaven would alone suffice," I said--perhaps unworthily. "Rubbish!" he ejaculated; and I felt that a word fitly spoken--or perhaps unfittingly--was rebuked. IV In due season, Albert went off to school, according to his father's plans; and it was not the school which Adele McComas had hoped to see Albert enter a little before her own boys should leave it. Raymond, after another year of daily attentions to Albert's small daily concerns, was glad to have him away. He did not see his boy's mother a frequent visitor at this school, nor did he purpose being a frequent visitor himself. The establishment was approved, well-recommended: let it do its work unaided, unhindered.