"It is!" said Madame Ribot. "Well----" and she kissed Henriette good-night, closing the scene without further inquiry, as became a wise woman who knew or thought she knew her daughter. "It's splendid about Helen," she added, pausing in the doorway. "Very!" Henriette replied. "Yes, she's found her place drawing for the press." Helen, who had thought that she had conquered happiness, was far from it. She had cried out to her mirror: "Oh, if it weren't for that nose I wouldn't be such a fright!" only to call herself a fool. The result of her conflicting emotions was to hurry downstairs and look up the railroad timetables. Then she went to her mother's room, a pale, distrait figure of impatience, with face drawn. "I'm going to take the seven-o'clock train in the morning," she said. "It's my work, you see." She had come quite close to her mother's side so abruptly that it was disturbing to her mother's composure. "You know best about that," said Madame Ribot, looking up at Helen's features with a return of the old wonder that Helen should be her child. "Please explain and say good-bye to the others, won't you?" "Yes. And, Helen, it's all settled between Henriette and Cousin Phil, isn't it?" "If she wishes." "If she wishes! What do you mean by that?" Madame Ribot had turned in her chair with a penetrating glance from her little eyes. "Why, what I say. But I don't know. I----" Helen wavered. "You were with them all the time at the chateau?" "Yes. If she wishes," was all that Helen could say, her voice crackling in its dryness. "That she has not wished it on other occasions. I see!" murmured Madame Ribot. "She does this time." "Good-bye!" "Good-bye! You've done wonderfully, Helen. Of course, it is better than nursing if you continue to make it go. You see, I was anxious about you if anything happened to me." "And I've been very trying sometimes. I'm sorry!" There was something whose place even successful drawings for the press could not supply--affection. Helen was singularly hungry for it to-night. "Of course you will write us and come down to see us!" said Madame Ribot. "Of course!" Helen repeated. She wished to be taken into her mother's arms, but it did not happen. And she was glad when the dawn, which found her awake, came and she softly glided downstairs on her way to the station. Peter Smithers on his "little farm" in Massachusetts, walking about and surveying the latest improvements and his high-bred cattle and swine, was hardly conscious that a woman leisurely undoing her hair in a vicarage in Truckleford was thinking of him. He had a fortune, poor man; and he was not unused to being the object of plots as the result of its possession. In her day Madame Ribot had been as fond of spinning webs of intrigue as she had of late the threads of recollection which had helped to pass the time.