"I will tell you the truth," she said at last. "I went out of Peter's life five years ago, and I said I would not return unless he wanted me. He was only a boy. I have put away all thought of him. If I come back to him now, I come as a stranger to be won again. I do not know Peter to-day." "Peter is still the same." Miranda was beginning to rebel against the immovable conviction of Peter's mother. Mrs. Paragon was so calm and sure. "How can I know that?" she exclaimed impatiently. "You can meet him," answered Mrs. Paragon. She had the air of one suggesting the obvious thing to a child. Miranda began to be seriously moved. Could she recapture the dead time? She saw herself quaintly perched on the slates of a roof sobbing her heart out, and again in a dark garden with Peter suddenly on his knees to her, kissing the hem of her frock. Perhaps, if she met him, without allowing him time to prepare, the truth would flash out of him. "Where can I meet him suddenly?" she asked. Mrs. Paragon quietly accepted her victory. "I have come to invite you," she said. "You shall see him with Vivette Claire." "What have I to do?" "You need only be ready here in a week's time. I will take you to dinner. It is a farewell dinner. Peter is going to sea for six months." "I will come." This was not Mrs. Paragon's last visit to Claridge's. In the days between her discovery of Miranda and Peter's dinner she talked with Miranda frequently and long. Miranda learned the whole story of Peter's life; learned also to sound every deep place in his mother. Of Miranda there was less to tell than the change in her seemed to require. Her father and mother had drowned fighting for life in the sea. She had waited on deck to the last, calmly accepting her fate. The terrible scenes about her of people huddled to a brutal end had not shaken her spirit. At the last moment she was pulled on to a raft, and made fast by the man who had found it. They passed through the night together, and he said she had saved him from despair. He was a Canadian farmer of French extraction. She passed for two years as his daughter, and at his death inherited his fortune. He had made her love the French, and she had lived mainly in France for the last three years. Thus had Miranda been kept, aloof and free; and thus wonderfully restored. There were a hundred prosaic ways in which her rediscovery might have been arranged; but for Peter, because Peter was young, the incredible was achieved. Chance had waited for her most effective moment, and was resolute that it should not be marred. Miranda's coming, like all true miracles, could only grow more wonderful the more it was explained. Upon the evening of Peter's dinner, Mrs. Paragon found Miranda serenely ready. She admitted to no excitement. "You need not look at me like that," she said to Mrs. Paragon when they met. "I am going to be introduced to a strange young man. It is not at all disturbing."