In the parlor, Winnie stood out of sight behind the freshly laundered curtains, and watched too. Laurence had left the house. She wondered if he were going to avoid her parents. As the time passed the sun disappeared again and shadows flowed into the street which was as gray and still as water. When the equipage with shining lacquered sides flashed into the empty place May looked at it bewildered, but Winnie had seen it through the window and recognized her parents. The carriage drew up before the house and the wheels scraping the curb made a long rasping sound. The chestnut horses were fat. Their harness twinkled. They wriggled the stumps of their clipped tails against the cruppers that constrained them. On their breasts where the circingles had rubbed and on their flanks and buttocks the hair was darkened and matted with lather. May was afraid and proud because the beautiful horses stood before her home. They stamped. A shiver ran along their satin bellies. Their breasts and forelegs quivered with tension as they jerked their heads in the check reins and pressed the street with harsh hoofs below their rigid ankles. Watching them, May uttered a little cry of terror and delight; but she thought some one had heard her and she clapped her hand over her mouth. The footman had jumped from his place, and Mr. and Mrs. Price were descending from the carriage. Indoors, Winnie felt her heart swell with a pain of pride. These were her parents. All these years she had been robbed of this! "Oh, Mamma Farley! They've come! They've come! I thought I should never see them again!" Winnie's smooth fingers clutched Mrs. Farley's stiff nerveless palm. "What shall I do? It hasn't been my fault, has it, Mamma Farley?" Winnie's soft relentless gaze clung to her mother-in-law's face. Mrs. Farley nervously desired to evade. Winnie made her feel guilty of the situation with which she had nothing to do. "Now, dear! Now, dear! We won't talk about who's to blame. Could your mother have written the note she did if she intended to reproach you?" "But Papa----And Laurence hasn't come back yet! He and Papa will quarrel again! You shouldn't have let him do this way, Mamma Farley! Oh, feel my hands! They're so cold!" Her eyes, large and dark, shone with a languid and deliberate excitement. She wished that Alice were in the room to see her. Wry thoughts of Laurence. Resentment in Winnie's mind was like grit in something that otherwise would have moved oiled. "What must I do, Mamma Farley? Shall I go to the door?" Winnie wrung her hands. "I think you ought to meet her first. She would like to speak to you before the rest of us come in." "Oh, I can't! How can Laurence leave me like this?" Mrs. Farley, called on again to explain Laurence, made some meaningless gestures--clasped and unclasped her hands. Her fingers, pressed hard as they intertwined, made her knuckles glow white. "Now, dear! Now, dear!"