Robert Harbottle was genuine enough, but one could not be surprised at a certain ambiguity; one tear for Robert, so to speak, and two for her boy. It could hardly be, for him, a marriage after his mother’s heart. And she laid down with some emphasis that Somers was brilliantly entitled to all he was likely to get--which was natural, too... I had been from the beginning so much ‘in it’ that Anna showed me, a year later, though I don’t believe she liked doing it, the letter in part of which Mrs. Harbottle shall finally excuse herself. ‘Somers will give you this,’ I read, ‘and with it take back your son. You will not find, I know, anything grotesque in the charming enthusiasm with which he has offered his life to me; you understand too well, you are too kind. And if you wonder that I can so render up a dear thing which I might keep and would once have taken, think how sweet in the desert is the pool, and how barren was the prospect from Balclutha.’ It was like her to abandon in pride a happiness that asked so much less humiliation; I don’t know why, but it was like her. And of course, when one thought of it, she had consulted all sorts of high expediencies. But I sat silent with remembrance, quieting a pang in my heart, trying not to calculate how much it had cost Judy Harbottle to take her second chance. End of Project Gutenberg’s The Pool in the Desert, by Sara Jeanette Duncan