Out of that same vacancy, which seemed to swallow and to hold everything, which seemed to exist both within and outside of herself, a multitude of forgotten images and impressions flashed into being. She saw the nursery fireside in the rectory, and her mother, with hair that still shone like satin, rocking back and forth in the black wicker chair with the sagging bottom. She saw her kneeling on the old frayed red and blue drugget, her skirt pinned up at the back of her waist, while she bathed her daughter's scratched and aching feet in the oblong tin foot-tub. She saw her, as beautiful as an angel, in church on Sunday mornings, her worshipful eyes lifted to the pulpit, an edge of tinted light falling on the open prayer-book in her hand. She saw her, thin and stooping, a shadow of all that she had once been--waiting--waiting----She had always been there. It was impossible to realize that a time could ever come when she would not be there--and now she was gone! And behind all the images, all the impressions, the stubborn thought persisted that this was life--that one could never escape it--that whatever happened, one must come back to it at the last. "I have my children still left--but for my children I could not live!" she thought, dropping on her knees by the bedside, and hiding her face in the grey wrapper. * * * * * After this it seemed to her that she ceased to live except in the lives of her children, and her days passed so evenly, so monotonously, that she only noticed their flight when one of the old people in Dinwiddie remarked to her with a certain surprise: "You've almost a grown daughter now, Jinny," or "Harry will soon be getting as big as his father. Have you decided where you will send him to college?" She was not unhappy--had she ever stopped to ask herself the question, she would probably have answered, "If only mother and father were living, I should be perfectly satisfied"; yet in spite of her assurances, there existed deep down in her--so deep that her consciousness had never fully grasped the fact of its presence--a dumb feeling that something was missing out of life, that the actuality was a little less bright, a little less perfect than it had appeared through the rosy glamour of her virgin dreams. Was this "something missing" merely one of the necessary conditions of mortal existence? Or was there somewhere on the earth that stainless happiness which she had once believed her marriage would bring to her? "I should be perfectly satisfied if only----" she would sometimes say in the night, and then check herself before she had ended the sentence. The lack, real as it was, was still too formless to lend itself to the precision of words; it belonged less to circumstances than to the essential structure of life. And yet, as she put it to herself in her rare moments of depression, she had so much to be thankful for! The children grew stronger as they grew older--since Harry's attack of