Horatio and his mother might feel the waste of all their efforts in behalf of Milly,--the costly removal from the West Side home, the disastrous venture in the tea and coffee business, and all the rest,--to result in _this_, her engagement to a "mere newspaper feller who parts his hair in the middle." It was another example of the mournful experience of age,--the pouring forth of heart's blood in useless sacrifice to Youth. But Milly saw that her artist lover,--and the flame in her heart, the song in her ears,--could not have been without all the devious turnings of her small career. Each step had been needed to bring her at last into Jack's arms, and therefore the toil of the road was nothing--in her eyes. That was the way Milly looked at it. Could one blame her, remembering her sentimental education, the sentimental ideals that for centuries upon centuries men have imposed upon the more imitative sex? She could not see the simple selfishness of her life,--not then, perhaps later when she too became a mother. * * * * * The catastrophe of her first engagement had cut Milly off from her more fashionable friends and the world outside, and this second emotional crisis cut her off from the sympathy of her family. After that first wail Horatio was glumly silent, as if his cup of sorrow was now filled, and Grandma Ridge went her way in stern oblivion of Milly. The girl was so happy--and so much away from home--that she hardly felt the cold domestic atmosphere. A few short weeks afterwards, however, Mrs. Ridge announced to her that a tenant having been found for the house they should move the first of the month. "Where are you going?" Milly asked, a trifle bewildered. "Your father and I are going to board on the West Side," her grandmother replied shortly, implying that Milly could do as she pleased, now that she was her own mistress. "Why over there?" "Your father has secured a place in his old business." From the few further details offered by her grandmother Milly inferred that it was a very humble place indeed, and that only dire necessity had forced Horatio to accept it,--to sit at the gate in the great establishment where once he had held some authority. "Poor papa!" Milly sighed. "It's rather late for you to be sorry, now," the old lady retorted pitilessly. She was of the puritan temper that loves to scatter irrefutable moral logic. It was not until long afterward that Milly learned all the part the indomitable old lady had played in this crisis of her son's affairs. She had not only gone to see Mr. Baxter, one of the Hopper partners who attended the Second Presbyterian Church, and begged him to give her son employment once more, but she had humbled herself to appeal personally to their enemy Henry Snowden and entreat him, for old friendship's sake, to be magnanimous to a broken man. In these painful interviews she had not spared Milly. She had succeeded. * * * * *