"No--no. But Freddy, I--I didn't mean it when I said that about Mortimore." "Said what?" Fred said, frowning with anxiety; "here, let me light the gas!" "No, don't!" Mrs. Payton put a restraining hand on her daughter's shoulder; "about--about loving him best. I don't, dear; truly I don't." "But, Mother!"--Fred put her arms about the soft, loose figure that tumbled into sobs against her--"I didn't know you said it, and if you did, I don't mind it in the least!" She felt her mother's tears on her cheek, and gathered her up against her breast; "Why, Mother! It's all right--really it is. It's all right to love him best--" "But I don't--I _don't_! I love you best." "Why," Fred soothed her, "I didn't even remember you'd said it. You only told me I was like Father--and that did me good." "No! I never said you were! And it isn't so. You're _not_--not a bit! My little Freddy!" Frederica smiled grimly in the darkness, and she let the statement pass; for suddenly something surged up in her breast; something she had never felt in her life; something that was actual pain; she had no name for it, but it made the tears sting in her eyes. "There, dear, there!" she comforted her cowering mother; ... "I understand," she said, brokenly; "I understand!" It is a wonderful moment, this moment of "understanding." It made Fred draw the foolish gray head down on her young breast, and caress and comfort it, as years ago her own little head had been caressed and kissed. They were both "mothers" at that moment. So Laura's wedding-day was lived through. And by and by the weeks that followed were lived through. And then the months pushed in between Fred and that night at the camp. She never spoke of Howard and Laura. "I wonder if she's got over it," Mrs. Payton speculated, wistfully. She was glad, for her part, that the bride and bridegroom had gone abroad, and she did not have to see them--"especially Laura!" she used to say to herself, bitterly. If Fred was bitter, she didn't show it; she was absorbed in league work, and a really growing real-estate business; it was all she could do to find time to listen when her mother talked, and talked, and talked--or people, or puzzles, or parlor-maids! But how could she fail to listen--no matter how dull and foolish the talk was--remembering that midnight of pity? "Freddy is getting very companionable," Mrs. Payton told Arthur Weston. He had come upon Fred bending over a puzzle spread out on the big table in the sitting-room, and trying to fit one wriggly piece of blue after another into a maliciously large expanse of uncharted sky; she had been obviously relieved at the chance to shift the entertainment of Mrs. Payton to his shoulders.