On the way home the mere feeling of Anne’s arm against hers drew her out of her solitariness. After all, she had only to wait. The new life was but a few weeks old; and already Anne’s nearness seemed to fill it. If only she could keep Anne near enough! “Did you like it, mother? How do we all strike you, I wonder?” the girl asked suddenly. “As kinder than anything I ever dreamed.” She thought she felt Anne’s surprised glance in the darkness. “Oh, _that_! But why not? It’s you who must try to be kind to us. I feel as if we must be so hard to tell apart. In Europe there are more contrasts, I suppose. I saw Uncle Fred helping you to sort us out this evening.” “You mean you caught me staring? I daresay I do. I want so much not to miss anything ... anything that’s a part of your life....” Her voice shook with the avowal. She was answered by a closer pressure. “You wonderful mother! I don’t believe you ever will.” She was conscious in Anne, mysteriously, of a tension answering her own. “Isn’t it splendid to be two to talk things over?” the girl said joyously. “_What things?_” Kate Clephane thought; but dared not speak. Her hand on Anne’s, she sat silent, feeling her child’s heart tremble nearer. VII. Every one noticed how beautifully it worked; the way, as Fred Landers said, she and Anne had hit it off from their first look at each other on the deck of the steamer. Enid Drover was almost emotional about it, one evening when she and Kate sat alone in the Clephane drawing-room. It was after one of Anne’s “young” dinners, and the other guests, with Anne herself, had been whirled off to some form of midnight entertainment. “It’s wonderful, my dear, how you’ve done it. Poor mother didn’t always find Anne easy, you know. But she’s taken a tremendous fancy to you.” Kate felt herself redden with pride. “I suppose it’s the novelty, partly,” Mrs. Drover continued, with her heavy-stepping simplicity. “Perhaps that’s an advantage, in a way.” But she pulled up, apparently feeling that, in some obscure manner, she might be offending where she sought to please. “Anne admires your looks so much, you know; and your slightness.” A sigh came from her adipose depths. “I do believe it gives one more hold over one’s girls to have kept one’s figure. One can at least go on wearing the kind of clothes they like.” Kate felt an inward glow of satisfaction. The irony of the situation hardly touched her: the fact that the youth and elasticity she had clung to so desperately should prove one of the chief assets of her new venture. It was beginning to seem natural that everything should lead up to Anne. “This business of setting up a studio, now; Anne’s so pleased that you approve. She had a struggle with her grandmother about it; but poor mother wouldn’t give in. She was too horrified. She thought paint so messy--and then how could she have got up all those stairs?”