Glen did not doubt his being right in this matter; Luke was always right. It would have been, nevertheless, a comfort to secure the expert opinion of a woman, some woman who had been successfully loved and married, which qualification, of course, eliminated Miss Ada, even if Glen had been willing to confide in her about her mountaineer. There was nothing for it, then, but time. Time, she knew, would help her to correct her own peculiarities, and time would likewise, she earnestly hoped, so increase Luke’s interests that he would hardly miss or notice the limitations of his wife. _Extremely_ busy and purposeful married people, such as she and Luke would be, could not, surely, have very much time left over for the sort of scenes which he had started in the lonely lane, on the afternoon of her nineteenth birthday. She visualized a serene and industrious future for them, filled to the brim with welfare work among Luke’s people and the mill hands, with economic triumphs and a new and model Altonia built on the mistakes of the old. And meanwhile, her loyalty to Luke was doubled; if she was failing him in one way, she would make it up to him in others! But there seemed to be margins of time, now, left over from her work, with Luke putting in almost every evening at the mill, and staying often on Sundays, and Glen found herself groping for a fresh interest. It was Gloriana-Virginia Tolliver who supplied the inspiration for it--fair exchange for the fairy-tale book which was faithfully remembered even on that shadowed day which found Glen nineteen years and one day old. “Say, Glen,” the child wanted to know a week later, “have yo’all got a Wishin’ Cyarpet?” “No, Glory! What made you think of that?” “Why”--she was a little shy about it--“yo’all live in sech a sweet-pretty house an’ wear sech sweet-pretty cloze, an’ do jes’ whatsoever yo’ wishful to do!” Glen laughed. Her clothes were of the plainest, and she had no illusions about the hideous house her mother had hated. “No, Glory, dear,” she shook her head, “I have no Wishing Carpet.” But no sooner had she said it than a six-year-old memory flashed before her--her question, and her mother’s answer--her pale and plaintive mother, her frail, frustrated mother who weakly wished for things she knew she could never have.... “Glory,” she said, after a thoughtful moment, watching the small wizened face brighten again, “I forgot! There is a rug I used to think was a Wishing Carpet! Of course, it isn’t really, but when I was little, I used to pretend--and even my mother made believe about it.” Gloriana-Virginia clasped her unpleasant little claws in rapture. “Oh, _Glen_! Would yo’all lemme see hit jes’ _once_? I promise, cross my heart, to be so _keerful_ not to dirty hit!”