“I didn’t tell her where I put the extra flannels—for the steamer. They say it’s cold—sometimes!” “Telegraph!” replied William Archer promptly. “Want me to go home with you?” They stood at the corner of the street. Annabel shook her head. “Of course not! Don’t be silly!... I shall telegraph to-night—a night-letter.” “Whereto?” She looked at him helplessly. “I don’t know.... And she’s always been so fixed before! Wherever I went, I seemed always just kind of circling around mother and coming back to her. And now she’s off like that—whirling into space!” She made a sweeping gesture of her hands and looked up to him appealingly. The little laugh left William Archer’s face. “There’s no one in the world, of course, like mother.... Never has been—for me.... I suppose all men feel that way—about their mothers.” He said it slowly and looked at her inquiringly. “But it seems somehow as if she were somebody in particular—and nobody else could know—how we feel about her.” “They can’t—and they don’t!” said Annabel grimly. They stood looking at each other with quiet understanding. They had not felt so near together in years, not since they played in the branches of the oak-tree, and William Archer had called down to her from the topmost branch: “Come on up!” She nodded to him with a little smile of remembrance and affection, and they turned and went their separate ways. XX From the window of the train Eleanor More looked out on green fields. They had emerged from the dark mouth of the tunnel into a spring day. The evening light was on the fields, and they stretched away to distant woods. The shadows along the ground caught a glow from the sky. “Looks like a clear day to-morrow,” said Richard. She nodded quietly. Her eyes were on the level green fields that moved past them, mile after mile. He put out his hand and covered hers where it lay on the seat between them. “Tired?” he asked. She shook her head. Then she drew a long breath and looked at him with a smile. “How good it seems!” she said slowly. “How good it seems—to get away from them all!” “We are beginning all over,” he responded. “Yes.... I can’t seem to worry about what’s happening to them.... Just a little worry—because I don’t worry—that’s all!” “You’ll get over that in a mile or so,” he replied confidently. It would seem she did get over it—or at least if she did not, she concealed it skilfully. The little lines in her face smoothed, one by one, and a tranquil look came to it. She sat for hours as the train moved over the level plain, the look of abstraction in her eyes and the gentleness and strength in her face revealing themselves—as the lines of a landscape are sometimes revealed by a change of light or by the passing of a storm—all the surface life slipped from it.