Doris felt her heart beat fast. She was not prepared to confide in Mrs. Tweksbury, certainly not at present. She loved the old woman for her good qualities, but she shrank from putting herself at the mercy of Mrs. Tweksbury's "inherited intuitions!" So she said nothing, but sent for the children. Hidden deep in the old woman's heart were all the denied and suppressed yearnings of a love that had escaped fulfilment--a love that had entered in after her marriage to a man utterly without sympathy with her, but which had been rigidly ignored because of the stern moral fibre that marked her. After the death of all those who had been concerned in her secret romance she had taken upon herself the more or less vicarious guardianship of the son of the man she had loved and foregone. The boy lived with his mother's people, and Mrs. Tweksbury only visited him occasionally; but her proud, stern old heart knew only one undying passion now--her passion for children. When Nancy and Joan stood before her, she regarded them with almost tragic, and, at the same time, comic expression. The children were frightened at her twitching, wrinkled face and glanced at Doris, who smiled them into calmness. In Joan, Mrs. Tweksbury saw resemblance to no one she remembered, so she concluded she must be like the father, physically, whom they must all ignore absolutely. Try as she valiantly did, the old lady felt her quick-beating heart falter before Joan's earnest, searching gaze. It was a relief to turn to Nancy and permit her eyes to dim and soften. "My dear, my dear," she said to Doris, "how like dear Merry the baby is! Just so, I recall--" Doris's face grew strained and ashy. "Please," she implored, "please, Aunt Emily--don't!" "Of course, of course, my child. Very indiscreet of me--but I was taken off my guard." Then--"My dears, will you kiss me?" This to the children keeping their courage up by clinging together. "No," Joan replied in a tone entirely free from bad manners but weighted with simple truth; "Joan likes to kiss Auntie Dorrie." The inference stiffened Mrs. Tweksbury and caused Doris a qualm. "And you?" The old lady's tone was pathetic in its appeal to Nancy--her "intuition" was at stake. Nancy drew nearer. She was fascinated, afraid, but guided by a strange impulse. "Nancy will," she panted, "Nancy will kiss you--two times!" Mrs. Tweksbury's breath caught in her throat--she strangled but controlled herself and bent as a queen might to the sweet uplifted face at her knee. After that visit Doris would have had a difficult task in stemming a flood that Mrs. Tweksbury directed, having removed the dam. While she fairly grovelled, emotionally, before Nancy, the old lady defended Joan by stern insistence upon traits of nobility unsuspected by others in the child. "The wretch of a father," she mentally vowed, "shall not have the child if suggestion can prevent."