“But the eyes--you chose your own eyes, my darling!” She had the girl at arms’-length, her own head thrown back a little: Anne was slightly the taller, and her pale face hung over her mother’s like a young moon seen through mist. “So wise of you! Such an improvement on anything we had in stock....” How absurd! When she thought of the things she had meant to say! What would her child think her? Incurably frivolous, of course. Well, if she stopped to consider _that_ she was lost.... She flung both arms about Anne and laid a long kiss on her fresh cheek. “My Anne ... little Anne....” She thirsted to have the girl to herself, where she could touch her hair, stroke her face, draw the gloves from her hands, kiss her over and over again, and little by little, from that tall black-swathed figure, disengage the round child’s body she had so long continued to feel against her own, like a warmth and an ache, as the amputated feel the life in a lost limb. “Come, mother: this way. And here’s Mr. Landers,” the girl said. Her voice was not unkind; it was not cold; it was only muffled in fold on fold of shyness, embarrassment and constraint. After all, Kate thought, it was just as well that the crowd, the confusion and Fred Landers were there to help them over those first moments. “Fred Landers! Dear old Fred! Is it you, really? Known me anywhere? Oh, nonsense! Look at my gray hair. But _you_--” She had said the words over so often in enacting this imagined scene that they were on her lips in a rush; but some contradictory impulse checked them there, and let her just murmur “Fred” as her hand dropped into that of the heavy grizzled man with a red-and-yellow complexion and screwed-up blue eyes whom Time had substituted for the thin loose-jointed friend of her youth. Landers beamed on her, silent also; a common instinct seemed to have told all three that for the moment there was nothing to say--that they must just let propinquity do its mysterious work without trying to hasten the process. In the motor Mrs. Clephane’s agony began. “What do they think of _me_?” she wondered. She felt so sure, so safe, so enfolded, with them; or she would have, if only she could have guessed what impression she was making. She put it in the plural, because, though at that moment all she cared for was what Anne thought, she had guessed instantly that, for a time at least, Anne’s view would be influenced by her guardian’s. The very tone in which he had said, facing them from his seat between the piled-up bags: “You’ll find this young woman a handful--I’m not sorry to resign my trust--” showed the terms the two were on. And so did Anne’s rejoinder: “I’m not a handful now to any one but myself--I’m in my own hands, Uncle Fred.”