A telegram--for her? It didn’t often happen nowadays. But after all there was no reason why it shouldn’t happen once again--at least once. There was no reason why, this very day, this day on which the sunshine had waked her with such a promise, there shouldn’t be a message at last, the message for which she had waited for two years, three years; yes, exactly three years and one month--just a word from him to say: “_Take me back._” She snatched up the telegram, and then turned her head toward the wall, seeking, while she read, to hide her face from Aline. The maid, on whom such hints were never lost, immediately transferred her attention to the dressing-table, skilfully deploying the glittering troops on that last battlefield where the daily struggle still renewed itself. Aline’s eyes averted, her mistress tore open the blue fold and read: “Mrs. Clephane dead--” A shiver ran over her. _Mrs. Clephane dead?_ Not if Mrs. Clephane knew it! Never more alive than today, with the sun crisping her hair, the violet scent enveloping her, and that jolly north-west gale rioting out there on the Mediterranean. What was the meaning of this grim joke? The first shock over, she read on more calmly and understood. It was the other Mrs. Clephane who was dead: the one who used to be her mother-in-law. Her first thought was: “Well, serve her right”--since, if it was so desirable to be alive on such a morning it must be correspondingly undesirable to be dead, and she could draw the agreeable conclusion that the other Mrs. Clephane had at last been come up with--oh, but thoroughly. She lingered awhile on this pleasing fancy, and then began to reach out to wider inferences. “But if--but if--but little Anne--” At the murmur of the name her eyes filled again. For years now she had barricaded her heart against her daughter’s presence; and here it was, suddenly in possession again, crowding out everything else, yes, effacing even Chris as though he were the thinnest of ghosts, and the cable in her hand a cock-crow. “But perhaps now they’ll let me see her,” the mother thought. She didn’t even know who “they” were, now that their formidable chieftain, her mother-in-law, was dead. Lawyers, judges, trustees, guardians, she supposed--all the natural enemies of woman. She wrinkled her brows, trying to remember who, at the death of the child’s father, had been appointed the child’s other guardian--old Mrs. Clephane’s overpowering assumption of the office having so completely effaced her associate that it took a few minutes to fish him up out of the far-off past. “Why, poor old Fred Landers, of course!” She smiled retrospectively. “I don’t believe he’d prevent my seeing the child if he were left to himself. Besides, isn’t she nearly grown up? Why, I do believe she must be.”