Kate shivered a little; but it was only a passing chill. The use the girl made of her authority was so different--as if the old Mrs. Clephane in her spoke from a milder sphere--and it was so sweet to be compelled, to have things decided for one, to be told what one wanted and what was best for one. For years Kate Clephane had had to order herself about: to tell herself to rest and not to worry, to eat when she wasn’t hungry, to sleep when she felt staring wide-awake. She would have preferred, on the whole, that evening, to slip into a tea-gown and go down to a quiet dinner, alone with her daughter and perhaps Fred Landers; she shrank from the hurricane that would start up in her head as soon as she was alone; yet she liked better still to be “mothered” in that fond blundering way the young have of mothering their elders. And besides, Anne perhaps felt--not unwisely--that again, for the moment, she and her mother had nothing more to say to each other; that to close on that soft note was better, just then, than farther effort. At any rate, Anne evidently did not expect to have her decision questioned. It was that hint of finality in her solicitude that made Kate, as she sank into the lavender-scented pillows, feel--perhaps evoked by the familiar scent of cared-for linen--the closing-in on her of all the old bounds. The next morning banished the sensation. She felt only, now, the novelty, the strangeness. Anne, entering in the wake of a perfect breakfast-tray, announced that Uncle Hendrik and Aunt Enid Drover were coming to dine, with their eldest son, Alan, with Lilla Gates (Lilla Gates, Kate recalled, was their married daughter) and Uncle Fred Landers. “No one else, dear, on account of this--” the girl touched her mourning dress--“but you’ll like to begin quietly, I know--after the fatigue of the crossing, I mean,” she added hastily, lest her words should seem to imply that her mother might have other reasons for shrinking from people. “No one else,” she continued, “but Joe and Nollie. Joe Tresselton, you know, married Nollie Shriner--yes, one of the Fourteenth Street Shriners, the one who was first married to Frank Haverford. She was divorced two years ago, and married Joe immediately afterward.” The words dropped from her as indifferently as if she had said: “She came out two years ago, and married Joe at the end of her first season.” “Nollie Tresselton’s everything to me,” Anne began after a pause. “You’ll see--she’s transformed Joe. Everybody in the family adores her. She’s waked them all up. Even Aunt Enid, you know--. And when Lilla came to grief--” “Lilla? Lilla Gates?”