He laughed, and the girl smiled. Kate wished her daughter and she had been facing each other, so that she could have seen the whole stretch of the smile, instead of only the tip dimpling away into a half-turned cheek. So much depended, for the mother, on that smile--on the smile, and the motion of those grave brows. The whole point was, how far did the one offset the other? “Yes,” Mr. Landers assented, “you’re a free agent now--been one for just three weeks, haven’t you? So far you’ve made fairly good use of your liberty.” Guardian and ward exchanged another smile, in which Kate felt herself generously included; then Landers’s eye turned to hers. “You’re not a bit changed, you know.” “Oh, come! Nonsense.” Again she checked that silly “look at my gray hair.” “I hope one never is, to old friends--after the first shock, at any rate.” “There wasn’t any first shock. I spotted you at once, from the pier.” Anne intervened in her calm voice. “I recognized mother too--from such a funny old photograph, in a dress with puffed sleeves.” Mrs. Clephane tried to smile. “I don’t know, darling, if I recognized you.... You were just there ... in me ... where you’ve always been....” She felt her voice breaking, and was glad to have Mr. Landers burst in with: “And what do you say to our new Fifth Avenue?” * * * * * She stood surveying its upper reaches, that afternoon, from the window of the sitting-room Anne had assigned to her. Yes; Fred Landers was right, it was a new, an absolutely new, Fifth Avenue; but there was nothing new about Anne’s house. Incongruously enough--in that fluid city, where the stoutest buildings seemed like atoms forever shaken into new patterns by the rumble of Undergrounds and Elevateds--the house was the very one which had once been Kate’s, the home to which, four-and-twenty years earlier, she had been brought as a bride.