Later while she ate her usual plain lunch she reviewed deliberately in some detail, the sentimental aspect of the situation. Not again would she see the daffodils swaying on their stems in the spring winds that every year swept Lynton; not again would she see the amazing blue of summer skies through the amazing green of beech trees; other hands would snap off the dead pansy heads and pick the lupins ranged along the mellow wall. A moment of forlornness, grim augury of the desolate weeks ahead, fell upon Sarah Greene, sitting in the crowded restaurant, to outward seeming an elderly woman contentedly eating her lunch. Panic squeezed her heart as she thought of the creeping growth that was working even now to her undoing, but her will automatically reasserted itself. Self-pity was repugnant to her; she was of the generation that held duty to be at the same time an aim and a reward, that accepted frustrations and tragedies as part of the necessary fabric of life. As she put down her coffee cup she dealt sharply with herself. Here I am, she thought, sitting in a ridiculous basket chair in a pink and white restaurant. I've just finished a pleasant lunch and bought a good mackintosh and now I'm letting myself get quite maudlin; I'm giving way to foolish fancies over what is only a natural event. Much better go back to Roger's little house and ring up my solicitor to make an appointment for to-morrow. The thought of this small task was enough to re-establish Mrs. Greene's poise. There were still things to be done that only she could do, and she sighed pleasurably as she remembered that the Lynton gardens, greedy like all gardens in their demand for time, care and skilled forethought, would claim her, so long as she could respond to any claim. As she talked to Mary a couple of hours later, Lynton was still uppermost in her mind, and her interest in the various aspects of Mary's coming maternity was kindly but perfunctory. Mary was the perfectly conventional middle class prospective mother, enjoying all the emotions possible to a first pregnancy: pride in her own adequacy, pride in the interest and the faint spice of danger that would be attached to her for the next few months--though as she eagerly assured Aunt Sarah, "The doctor is frightfully pleased with me. He says I'm ideally fitted to be a mother,"--pride in Roger's love and anxiety, and an overwhelming pleasure at the thought of a small naked body to be intricately clothed in wools and muslins, laces and ribbons. "I feel it's going to be a girl," she said positively. "And I'm going to make her the loveliest little frilled cloak with a tiny bonnet to match." "As a matter of fact, Mary," answered Aunt Sarah equally positively, "I think it will be a boy." A look of keen delight suddenly lit up her face.