"My darling," she said tenderly, "we really mustn't go too fast, but I want you to know one thing: Everything I've done has always been in the hope of giving you happiness, and if this turns out satisfactorily it will be the most beautiful thing for me to know that it was I who brought it about." Lavinia's voice rang with assurance. "It will turn out all right, Mother, there can't be a hitch or a flaw. You'll see to-morrow." "Yes, I'll see to-morrow," said Edith. "And now, dear child, I must go back to your father. Sleep quietly and well, and don't be excited." She kissed Lavinia and held her face for a moment between her hands. "I'm a very happy mother," she said, "and a very proud one, too, to think I've been able to give you what may very well prove to be the best thing in your life. Good-night, and God bless you." MRS. EDWIN GREENE MRS. EDWIN GREENE I There hung about Dora Greene an atmosphere of moribundity and stagnation that inevitably led her relations and acquaintances to classify her as a bore. Her conversation was monotonous, self-centred, and wound its interminable way in and out among the intricacies of her numerous afflictions. The neglect from which she was convinced she suffered, the slights she so patiently endured, and the difficulty of making ends meet on a reduced income formed the dim tapestry of her life. The genuinely tragic accident which had robbed her of her son, lost most of its poignancy by being endlessly referred to in this ignoble context, and the one consistently vivid emotion in her life was her passionate unsleeping jealousy of her sister-in-law, Mrs. Rodney Greene. Apart from this and from the frequent scenes which it occasioned--scenes of hysterical reproaches met reasonably though unsympathetically--Dora Greene fumbled her way through each day, accumulating new grievances and brooding over old ones. Nevertheless, three times in her life she had lived purposely and intensely: for half an hour before her first and only proposal; during the few months that her husband was at the front; and for a moment when her son was dying. II Dora Pilkington at twenty-four had been that pitiful thing, the victim of an ill-natured mother. Mrs. Pilkington was obsessed by social ambitions which had been persistently thwarted; some at their tenderest stage of growth; some more cruelly, when they held out promise of fulfilment. There had been a bazaar; the celebrity who was to open it failed to arrive. The committee approached Mrs. Pilkington, the vicar's wife, and had in fact asked her to perform the ceremony, when another member hurrying up had announced the appearance of a certain lady, wife of a commercial knight well established in the county. With murmurs of "Thank you so much," and "Then we needn't trouble you now," the anxious ladies had fluttered away, intent on higher prey, and the vicar's wife was left with her words of acceptance bitter on her lips.