"Robert, how absurd you are! You know I could never dislike you. But our--our age, and David, and--" He put an abrupt hand on her shoulder and looked hard into her eyes; then for a single minute he covered his own. "Don't talk about age, and all that nonsense. Don't talk about little things, Helena, for God's sake! Oh, my dear--" he said, brokenly. He got up and went across the room to a bookcase; he stood there a moment or two with his back to her. Helena Richie, bewildered, her eyes full of tears, looked after him in dismay. But when he took his chair again, he was "commonplace" enough, and when, later, David came in, he was able to talk in the most matter-of-fact way. He told the young man that evidently Mrs. Maitland had changed her mind about a hospital. "Of course some papers may turn up that will entitle you to your fund, but I confess I'm doubtful about it. I'm afraid she changed her mind." "Probably she did," David said, laconically; "well, I am glad she thought of it,--even if she didn't do it. She was a big person, Mr. Ferguson; I didn't half know how big a person she was!" For a moment his face softened until his own preoccupations faded out of it. "Nobody knew how big she was--except me," Robert Ferguson said. Then he began to talk about her. . . . It was nearly midnight when he ended; when he did, it was with an outburst of pain and grief: "Nobody understood her. They thought because she ran an iron-works, that she wasn't--a woman. I tell you she was! I tell you her heart was a woman's heart. She didn't care about fuss and feathers, and every other kind of tomfoolery, like all the rest of you, but she was as--as modest as a girl, and as sensitive. You needn't laugh--" "Laugh?" said Helena Richie; "I am ready to cry when I think how her body misrepresented her soul!" He nodded; his chin shook. "Big, generous, incapable of meanness, incapable of littleness!--and now she's dead. I believe her disappointment about Blair really killed her. It cut some spring. She has never been the same woman since he--" He stopped short, and looked at David; no one spoke. Then Mrs. Richie asked some casual question about the Works, and they began to talk of other things. When his guests said good-night, Robert Ferguson, standing on his door-step, called after them: "Oh, hold on: David, won't you and your mother come in to dinner to-morrow? Luncheon, your mother calls it. She wants us to be fashionable in Mercer! Nobody here but Miss White and Elizabeth." "Yes, thank you; we'll come with pleasure," Mrs. Richie called back, and felt the young man's arm grow rigid under her hand. The mother and son walked on in silence. It had stopped raining, but the upper sky was full of fleecy clouds laid edge to edge like a celestial pavement; from between them sometimes a serene moon looked down. "David, you don't mind staying over for a day?" "Oh no, not at all. I meant to." "And you don't mind--seeing Elizabeth?"