Anne pressed her closer. “Can’t we agree, mother, that I must take my chance--and that, if the risks are as great as you think, you’ll be there to help me? After all, we’ve all got to buy our own experience, haven’t we? And perhaps the point of view about ... about early mistakes ... is more indulgent now than in your time. But I don’t want to discuss that,” the girl hurried on. “Can’t we agree not to discuss anything--not even Chris--and just be the perfect friends we were before? You’d say yes if you knew the difference it has made, this last year, to have you back!” She lifted her face close to Mrs. Clephane’s to add, with a half-whimsical smile: “Mothers oughtn’t ever to leave their daughters.” Kate Clephane sat motionless in that persuasive hold. It did not seem to her, at the moment, as if she and her child were two, but as if her whole self had passed into the young body pressed pleadingly against her. “How can I leave her--how can I ever leave her?” was her only thought. “You see,” the cajoling voice went on, “when I asked you to come back and live with me, though I _did_ want you to, most awfully, I wasn’t as sure ... well, as sure as Uncle Fred was ... that the experiment would be a success--a perfect success. My life had been rather lonely, but it had been very independent too, in spite of Granny, and I didn’t know how well I should behave to my new mother, or whether she’d like me, or whether we’d be happy together. And then you came, and the very first day I forgot all my doubts--didn’t _you_?” Kate Clephane assented: “The very first day.” “And every day afterward, as I saw how right Uncle Fred had been, and how perfectly he’d remembered what you were, and what you would have been to me if we hadn’t been separated when I was a baby, I was more and more grateful to you for coming, and more and more anxious to make you forget that we hadn’t always been together.” “You did make me forget it--” “And then, suddenly, the great gulf opened again, and there I was on one side of it, and you on the other, just as it was in all those dreary years when I was without you; and it seemed as if it was you who had chosen again that we should be divided, and in my unhappiness I said dreadful things.... I know I did....” Kate felt as if it were her own sobs that were shaking her daughter’s body. She held her fast, saying over and over, as a mother would to a child that has fallen and hurt itself: “There, there ... don’t cry.” She no longer knew what she herself was feeling. All her consciousness had passed into Anne. This young anguish, which is the hardest of all to bear, must be allayed: she was ready to utter any words that should lift that broken head from her breast.