I

“Muriel thinks,” said Isabel, “that Belle should go into mourning.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Jane. “The Lesters always had a lot of family feeling.”

“Just the same,” said Isabel, “I’ve just bought all her maternity clothes. So soon after the trousseau. And they’re so pretty. Modern clothes are really very concealing. When I think of the tight waists we had to wear⁠—and all those pleats put in to let out! Don’t you think it seems ridiculous to order another set?”

“Yes,” said Jane. “But Muriel adored her mother. So did Edith and Rosalie.”

“Oh, I’ve no doubt,” said Isabel, “that they’ll all flap about like black crows for two years. But Belle’s so young⁠—she hardly knew Mrs. Lester⁠—and the baby’s coming in two months. She’s worried about Albert. I hate to plunge her into black.”

Isabel was sitting on the window-seat in Jane’s blue bedroom. They were discussing Mrs. Lester’s death, which had occurred the night before, and Mrs. Lester’s funeral, which would take place next day. Mrs. Lester had died in her sleep. She had been found dead by her maid coming in with her breakfast tray. Her death had been a great shock to Muriel.

“Belle hasn’t heard from Albert?” asked Jane. “Any plans, I mean?”

“He has no plans,” said Isabel resentfully. “No more than Jack has. How can they plan, poor darlings? I think it’s outrageous for the Government to keep them hanging around France four months after the armistice! As far as I can see, it didn’t do anybody a bit of good for them to go over. They might just as well have stayed in Rockford.”

That was quite true, reflected Jane. Jack had not even seen action, Albert had spent the last two days of the war sitting in a muddy trench. Neither boy had struck a blow at the Germans. Albert had not seen nearly as much fighting in France as Stephen had at San Juan Hill.

“Muriel’s going to be a dreadful mother-in-law,” said Isabel irrelevantly.

Jane could not help smiling. She knew what Cicily thought of Isabel in that capacity. Belle and Cicily, in the absence of their young husbands, had seen a great deal of their mothers-in-law.

“You’d think,” Cicily had said, only last evening to Jane and Stephen, “you’d think she was going to have the baby⁠—not me!”

“You’d think,” said Isabel, while Jane was smiling, “you’d think Muriel was going to have Belle’s baby. She’s bought her some lovely things, of course, but she’s always interfering. And now she wants her to wear crepe!”

“I’d like to wear crepe myself,” said Jane. “I loved Mrs. Lester.”

“She was a grand old matriarch,” said Isabel, rising with a sigh. “Still, she was over eighty. Muriel knew she couldn’t live forever. Queer, isn’t it, that Bert should outlive her⁠—in the state he’s been in for the last five years?”

“How is Papa?” asked Jane, rising in her turn.

“Oh, much better. His cold is almost gone. Dr. Bancroft says he can go to the funeral.”

“Not up to Graceland?” said Jane, with a glance at the February sleet storm that was silvering the garden. “In this weather?”

“I don’t know about Graceland,” said Isabel, “but, anyway, the church. They’ve asked him to be an honorary pallbearer.”

“Of course,” said Jane. “I suppose he was Mrs. Lester’s oldest friend. He was awfully fond of her.”

“Well, everyone was,” said Isabel. “But I’m not going to let Belle go into mourning.”

“Black for the funeral,” urged Jane pacifically.

“Of course,” said Isabel. “That’s only decent.” She turned toward the door. “How is Cicily feeling today?”

“Very well,” said Jane. “She’s in town at the concert.”

“They go everywhere, don’t they?” said Isabel. “They don’t care how they look.”

“I think that’s fine,” said Jane.

“But it’s funny,” said Isabel. “Last Friday night at the Casino I heard Cicily telling Billy Winter that she had engaged a room at the Lying-in Hospital. I spoke to her about that. I didn’t quite like it.”

“They take it all as a matter of course,” said Jane.

“I know,” said Isabel. “But to a young bachelor⁠—”

“I’m sure he didn’t mind,” said Jane.

“He didn’t,” said Isabel. “But I thought he should have.”

“It’s a different generation, old girl,” said Jane.

II

Last week it had been a bad cold. The morning after Mrs. Lester’s funeral it had turned into bronchitis. Yesterday it was a touch of pneumonia. Today⁠—

Jane stood in the doorway of Mr. Ward’s library, holding a great sheaf of budding Ophelia roses, looking anxiously into Isabel’s worried eyes.

“I’m glad you came in, Jane,” said Isabel soberly.

“Of course I came in,” said Jane. She walked quietly across the room to her father’s desk and put her flowers down on the two days’ accumulation of mail that waited for him, propped up against the brass humidor. Then she turned again to face Isabel.

“I just can’t realize it,” she said. “Day before yesterday I was talking to him, here in this room.”

“I’m glad you came while Dr. Bancroft was here.” Isabel’s voice was as worried as her eyes. “He’s upstairs with Mamma.”

“How’s Mamma taking it?” asked Jane.

“Oh⁠—she’s fine,” said Isabel. “She always is, you know, when there’s anything really the matter. She didn’t leave Papa’s bedside all night. I don’t think she got a wink of sleep. Minnie’s been awful.”

“Awful?” questioned Jane.

“About the trained nurse. She just took one look at her and turned ugly. You know how Minnie is.”

“She’s very capable,” said Jane. “And she adores us all.”

“Yes,” said Isabel, “but she likes to run the whole show herself. Mamma’s been very silly about Minnie. She’s let her think she was indispensable.”

“She pretty nearly is,” sighed Jane. “She’s not really acting up, is she?”

“Oh, no,” said Isabel. “She’s just terribly gloomy. Goes around, you know, with a tremendous chip on her shoulder. She does what the nurse tells her to, but she does it grudgingly. She looks as if she’d like to say, ‘Don’t blame me if it rains!’ ”

“Does it bother Mamma?” asked Jane.

“Of course it does,” said Isabel. “You know she always has Minnie’s attitude on her mind.”

“It’s ridiculous,” said Jane, “at a time like this!”

“Of course it is,” said Isabel. Both women turned at the sound of a step in the hall.

“There’s the doctor now,” said Jane, picking up her roses.

Mrs. Ward entered the room, followed by Dr. Bancroft. She had on her grey silk dinner dress. Jane realized that she could not have changed it since the night before. Her face looked terribly worn and weary and worried. She had taken off the black velvet ribbon she always wore about her throat in the evening. In the slight V-shaped décollétage of the grey silk dress the cords of her neck, freed from the restraining band, hung in slack, yellow furrows. There were great brown circles under her tired eyes. Dr. Bancroft, brisk and immaculate in his blue serge morning suit, looked extremely clean and clever and competent beside her.

“Jane!” said Mrs. Ward. “I didn’t know you’d come.” Her face quivered, a trifle emotionally, at the sight of the roses. She kissed her younger daughter.

“How is he?” Jane’s eyes sought the doctor’s.

“Fine!” said Dr. Bancroft briskly. “In excellent shape, all things considered.”

“Is the second lung affected?” asked Jane.

“Just one tiny spot,” said Dr. Bancroft very cheerfully.

“Can I see him?” asked Jane. “Can I take him these roses?”

“Certainly,” said Dr. Bancroft. “But don’t try to talk to him.”

“He’s very drowsy,” said Mrs. Ward.

“He’s tired,” said Dr. Bancroft. “His system’s been putting up a big fight all night. His vitality is amazing for a man of his age.” He smiled pleasantly at Mrs. Ward. “Now, don’t worry. What he needs is rest. Miss Coulter will order the oxygen. You’d better lie down yourself, this morning, Mrs. Ward. You look all in.” He turned from the doorway and met Minnie on the threshold. She glanced at him inimically. Minnie looked all in, too. But very gloomy.

“Get a nap, yourself, Minnie,” smiled Dr. Bancroft. “There is nothing you can do.”

“I’ll not nap,” said Minnie briefly.

“I’ll drop in again after luncheon,” said the doctor casually. “And, by the way, Mrs. Ward⁠—I’m sending up a second nurse for the night work.”

“A second⁠—nurse?” faltered Mrs. Ward.

Jane and Isabel looked into each other’s eyes.

“Just to spare you,” said Dr. Bancroft. “You must save your strength.” He smiled pleasantly at Jane and Isabel. “Good morning.” He brushed by Minnie’s outraged figure and was gone.

Jane stood a moment in silence, fingering her roses. Her father had pneumonia⁠—double pneumonia. And all because of the folly of going to Mrs. Lester’s funeral. Standing beside an open grave for twenty minutes, bareheaded in the February breeze, ankle-deep in the February slush of a Graceland lot. Paying the last tribute, of course, to the friendship of a lifetime. But twenty minutes⁠—by the grave of an old, old lady whose life was over⁠—and now⁠—double pneumonia.

“Well⁠—I guess I’ll go up,” said Jane. How long had they all been staring in silence at the door that had closed behind the doctor?

“I’ll take you, Mrs. Carver,” said Minnie officiously.

Jane looked steadily into her eager, resentful face. Dear old Minnie, who had been with them all for more than thirty years! Jane slipped her arm around the plump waist above the white apron strings.

“Thank you, Minnie,” she said.

As she left the room, she saw her mother sink into her father’s leather armchair. She walked slowly down the hall and up the stairs with Minnie. She had a queer dazed feeling that this⁠—this couldn’t be happening. Not to her father. Not to the Wards. Nothing⁠—nothing⁠—really serious had ever happened to them. Jimmy’s death, of course. But that had only happened to her. It had not torn the fabric of family life⁠—it had not uprooted the associations of her earliest childhood. Cicily’s marriage⁠—worrying, perplexing, of course, but not⁠—not terrifying, like this sort of worry.

The house seemed quieter than usual. Hushed. Expectant. Jane suddenly remembered the sinister silence of the upper corridor of Flora’s house that April morning twenty-two years ago, when she had walked out under the budding elm trees for her first encounter with death. The battered door⁠—the smell of gas⁠—the feeling of little living Folly beneath her feet⁠—the incredulity⁠—the finality⁠—the horror. And Stephen⁠—hushed young Stephen⁠—standing so gravely between the green-and-gold portieres in Flora’s hall. The terrible vividness of youthful impressions! But why did it all come back to her now? Now⁠—when she was trying to fight off this senseless sense of impending tragedy⁠—of terror.

Jane tapped lightly on her father’s door. It was opened by Miss Coulter, in crisp, starched linen. Her smile, as she took the roses, was just as brisk, just as cheerful as Dr. Bancroft’s had been. Jane entered her father’s room. He was lying, under meticulously folded sheets, in the big double black walnut bedstead that he had shared with Jane’s mother since Jane’s earliest memory. His eyes were closed and he was resting easily. His breath came curiously, however, in long, slow gasps. His breast, beneath the meticulously folded sheets, rose and fell, laboriously, with the effort of his breathing.

Nevertheless, at the sight of him, Jane felt a sudden flood of reassurance. He did not look very ill. His face, beneath his neatly combed white hair, was smoothly relaxed in sleep.

It looked unnatural only because Miss Coulter had removed his gold-framed spectacles.

The nurse came softly to the bedside, the roses in a glass vase in her hand. She placed them on the bed table.

“I’ll tell him that you brought them, Mrs. Carver,” she murmured. “I think you hadn’t better stay just now.”

All sense of reassurance fell away from Jane at her hushed accents. Of course, he was terribly ill. He was seventy-three years old and he had double pneumonia. She would not kiss him⁠—she would not touch him⁠—she would not disturb him. He must have every chance. Jane turned from the bedside and joined Minnie on the threshold. With an air of crisp and kindly competence, Miss Coulter noiselessly closed the bedroom door.

When Jane reentered the library, her mother was crying in her father’s armchair. Isabel, standing on the hearthrug, was looking at her a little helplessly. She turned to stare at Jane’s sober face. Jane realized, with a sudden sense of shock, that she had not seen her mother cry since her own wedding day.

“Mamma⁠—don’t,” she said brokenly, as she sank down on the arm of her father’s chair. “I think he looks very well⁠—”

Mrs. Ward only shook her grey head and went on silently crying. Isabel still stared helplessly from the hearthrug. A curious little flame of macabre excitement was flickering about the ashes of pity and grief and terror that choked Jane’s heart. Her father had double pneumonia. Her father might be going to die. Something really serious had happened to the Wards.

III

Jane sat in a rocking-chair, drawn closely to her father’s bedside. Beyond the bed, on a little walnut sofa, her mother and Isabel were sitting. At the farther end of the room, in two chairs by the fireside, Robin and Stephen were sharing their quiet vigil.

They were waiting in silence. They had been waiting in silence, just like that, for more than three hours. Dr. Bancroft and Miss Coulter had been in and out. They were talking to each other, now, in the dressing-room beyond the fireplace. Jane could hear their whispering voices very faintly in the silence of the sickroom. A silence otherwise unbroken, save for the occasional staccato whirr of a passing motor on the boulevard in front of the house, and by the slow rhythmic cadence of Mr. Ward’s loud, laboured breathing. It was four o’clock in the morning and the motors passed very infrequently. The breathing went steadily on, however, with a dreadful, mechanical regularity. It assaulted the ear. It filled the quiet room like the roar of a bombardment. One shell fell. Then silence. Then another shell. Then silence. Then another shell.

The night-light was placed so that the bed lay in shadow, but Jane could see her father’s figure very distinctly. His chest rose and fell, mechanically, in his rhythmic struggle for breath. The oxygen tank had been abandoned. It still stood on the floor beneath the bed table. Mr. Ward’s face was white and pinched and drawn and completely weary⁠—weary with the supreme exhaustion of approaching death. It showed no sign of consciousness. The eyes were closed and the mouth was slightly open. His hands lay relaxed on the meticulously ordered sheets.

Jane sat looking at those hands. Old hands, fragile and blue-veined, with a black seal ring upon one little finger. They were still her father’s hands. The approach of death had not altered them as it had the drawn and weary face. The spark of life was in them. They were living hands. The face was terrifying. The face was relaxed, defenceless and beaten. It was no longer her father’s living face. It had lost the spark.

But the breathing continued. The breathing continued in slow, even, raucous gasps. The gasps were terrifying, but not as terrifying as the intervals between them. The intervals seemed endless. Shaken by the dreadful deliberation of that laboured breathing, Jane wondered, terrified, in every interval, if the gasp would come again.

It did, however. It came with the impersonal regularity of a clock tick. Presently the clock would stop. Her father was dying. He would not live through the night. Three days ago he had sat in his leather armchair, in the library downstairs, lightly reassuring Jane on the state of his bronchitis. Tomorrow he would be dead. The roses that Jane had brought to his bedside were still in the vase on the table. The buds had barely reached their prime. Only that morning her father had commented on their ephemeral, creamy bloom. Those roses would outlive him. Life would go on.

Life would go on for Jane without his sustaining presence. Without his tacit sympathy, his love, his watchfulness, his warning, worried glance. He had worried and warned and watched and loved and sympathized over Jane for forty-one years, and now he was dying. He was dying just at the time when Jane felt she could have rewarded his love and sympathy as never before. There was no longer any necessity for worrying and warning and watching over her personal drama. She had grown up. Soon she would grow old. She saw life, now, eye to eye with her father. She, too, had become a spectator. Her children had taken the stage.

Once she had worried him awfully. She had not heeded his warning. She had been swept by the intoxication of her love for Jimmy into indifference, into resentment even, toward that warning and that worry. She had given him a very bad time. Jane regretted that now. But she could not regret her love for Jimmy. With all his tenderness, with all his understanding, her father had not tried to understand that love. He had merely deplored it. “Safety first” was always the parental slogan. Parents invariably deplored everything that threatened their children’s security. Whatever their own experience had been, they desired for the younger generation only the most conventional, the most convenient, kind of happiness.

Her father’s experience. Jane looked at the worn, white face that lay upon the pillow. It told no tales. The spirit was withdrawn from that face into some remote and impenetrable fastness, where it awaited in solitude the last adventure of life. It was oblivious of love, oblivious of care, oblivious of companionship. Stricken suddenly with a sense of the loneliness of death, Jane leaned forward to take her father’s incredibly inert, intolerably touching hand. The fingers were cold. They returned no answering pressure. Jane softly withdrew her hand. She could not reach him.

But was death, as a matter of fact, any more lonely than life? What had Jane ever known about her father’s actual earthly experience? Parents knew little enough of the emotional lives of their children, but children knew nothing of the emotional lives of their parents. The emotional life of a parent was a fantastic thought. In all the forty-one years that they had shared together, Jane had never achieved, she had never even sought to achieve, one single revealing glimpse of the secret stage on which the passionate personal drama of her father’s life had been enacted.

What was that drama? Why had he loved her mother? Had he always loved her? Had there been no other girl before, no other woman after, he had met and married her?

What had her parents really been, when they shared the romance of their early youth? Jane knew how they had looked. She had always known that because of the pictures in the red plush family album downstairs in the rosewood cabinet in the yellow drawing-room. Glossy, matter-of-fact photographs of the early seventies. Her mother at nineteen, in her wedding dress, with its formal pleats and exaggerated bustle of thick white satin and its little frill of sheer white lace that stood up stiffly at the back of her slender neck and framed her young, round face and the preposterous waterfall of her blonde curly hair. Her graceful young figure was elegantly posed on a photographer’s rustic bridge in the fashionable, backbreaking curve of the “Grecian bend.” A charming, artificial figure. A pretty, grave little face. And her father framed in the oval of the opposite page. Her father in the middle twenties. A handsome young man with big dark eyes and a sensitive mouth and the faintest suspicion of a sideburn on his lean young cheeks. A serious young man, with hair just a little too long and a collar just a little too big, and black satin coat lapels that were cut a trifle queerly. How had those two young people made out with marriage? Jane could not really believe they were her parents. She had no sense of the continuity of their personality. They had died young⁠—those two young people. They had not grown up into Mr. and Mrs. John Ward of Pine Street, who had always seemed to Jane, since her earliest memory, so staid, so settled, so more than middle-aged.

“All lives,” her father had said to her before Cicily’s marriage, “are difficult at times.” What had been his difficulties? Jane did not know. The difficulties of Victorian marriages had been mercifully concealed by Victorian reticence from the eyes and ears of Victorian children. But what, for that matter, did Cicily, Jenny, and Steve know of herself and Stephen?

Jane’s eyes wandered from the white face on the pillow to her mother’s dim figure sunk on the walnut sofa beyond the bed. Mrs. Ward was looking at her husband. Her eyes were dull with grief, her face expressionless with fatigue. What did her mother know, Jane wondered, that she and Isabel did not, of the passionate personal drama of her father’s life? What did wives know of husbands, or husbands know of wives? Stephen had absolutely no conception of the thoughts that passed daily through her mind. No knowledge whatever of that vast accumulation of confused impressions and vague convictions and wistful desires that made up the world of revery in which she really lived. Stephen had his world of revery, too, of course. Everyone had. In the first disarming experience of love you tried to share that world. You flung open the door. You offered the key. But somehow, in spite of love, with time and incident the door swung slowly shut again. You never noticed it until you found yourself locked securely in, with the key in your own pocket. You really wondered how it had come to be there. You could not remember just when or why you had stopped saying⁠—everything. But at the end of twenty years of marriage it was astounding to consider the number of things, that somehow, you had never said⁠—

Jane was roused from revery by Isabel’s sudden movement, by her mother’s sharp, stifled exclamation. She stared at her father’s face. The mouth had dropped slightly more open. The chest was motionless. The slow raucous gasps were silenced. The bombardment had ceased.

“Dr. Bancroft! Dr. Bancroft!” cried Isabel shrilly. The doctor appeared instantly in the dressing-room door. He moved quickly to the bedside. Miss Coulter followed him. He took her father’s hand and felt the wrist for a moment in silence. He looked at Mrs. Ward. Robin and Stephen had crossed the room. They stood staring down at Mr. Ward from the foot of the bed. Her mother was crying. Isabel’s arm was around her. They, too, were staring down at Mr. Ward.

Her father was dead, thought Jane dully. Her father had died, as she sat at his bedside thinking abstract thoughts of life⁠—of her own personal problems. How could she have thought such thoughts at such a moment? Lost in the complications presented by her own drama, she had not seen the curtain fall on the last act of her father’s life. She had not sensed the final approach of death. She had been totally unaware of that last, fearfully awaited gasp.

Her mother had risen. Isabel’s arm was still around her. Stephen’s hand was on Jane’s shoulder. She rose slowly from her chair, staring down at the white, pinched face that lay upon the pillow⁠—the face that was not her father’s.

“Come, dear,” said Stephen tenderly. At the sound of his voice Jane felt her eyes fill suddenly with tears. Her father was dead. Stephen’s hand was on her elbow. His touch grew firm and insistent.

“Come, dear,” he said again. He led her to the door. Robin and Isabel were already there. Her mother was weeping in their arms.

“Come, dear,” Robin was saying. Her father was dead, and they were all running away from him. In response to some strange, instinctive recoil, life was retreating from death. They were leaving him to Dr. Bancroft and Miss Coulter.

“I⁠—I want to stay!” cried Jane a little wildly.

“No, dear,” said Stephen protectively, “come.” Somehow, Jane found herself in the darkened hall. Her mother was at her elbow.

“Come, Mamma, dear,” Isabel was saying.

“He’s⁠—dead,” said Mrs. Ward dully.

“Come, dear,” said Isabel insistently, through her tears.

“I’ve⁠—no one⁠—now,” said Mrs. Ward slowly.

Jane suddenly realized that Minnie had joined them. Her face was distorted with weeping.

“You’ve got me,” said Minnie. Competently she drew Mrs. Ward from Isabel’s restraining arm. “You come and lie down in the guestroom,” she said. Mrs. Ward permitted herself to be led away. Jane, in the darkened corridor, looked blankly, tearlessly, at Stephen, Isabel, and Robin. Her father was dead.

IV

Jane sat in the sunny corner of Cicily’s room in the Lying-in Hospital, holding the week-old twins in her arms. How ridiculous, how adorable of them to be twins, she was thinking, as she gazed down at their absurdly red, absurdly wrinkled, absurdly tiny faces. Little John Ward and little Jane Ward Bridges! John and Jane⁠—Cicily’s son and daughter!

Jane had wondered, a trifle anxiously, if she would experience a pang at the sight of a grandchild⁠—if grandmother-hood had birth pangs of its own. But no⁠—she had produced her grand-twins, vicariously to be sure, without any spiritual travail. She loved being a grandmother. She loved little Jane, and especially little John Ward Bridges, little John Ward, who had come into the world to take up life and his name, just six weeks after his great-grandfather had left it. Life had gone on.

Jane wished, terribly, that her father might have lived to see this great-grandson. He so nearly had. Things happened so quickly as you grew older. Jane felt she had barely recovered from those three dreadful days when her father’s life was hanging in the balance, from the shock of his death, from the pity and sorrow of the readjustment of her mother’s life, when the hour arrived, at two o’clock one March morning, when, stealing out of bed and leaving a note for Stephen on her pincushion, she had rushed with Cicily in the motor from the Lakewood house to the Lying-in Hospital, where she had sat in a waiting-room, a beautifully furnished, green-walled waiting-room that looked exactly like the bleak parlour of an exceptionally good hotel, for six, eight, ten hours, waiting for Cicily’s twins to come into the world.

Cicily had been born in the house on Pine Street. Jenny and Steve in the blue bedroom at Lakewood. Jane did not entirely hold with hospitals as a stage set for birth. In spite of surgeon’s plaster labels stuck on newborn shoulder blades, in spite of scientific footprints taken in birth-rooms, Jane had been terribly afraid that the twins would be mixed up with someone else’s babies. Cicily had laughed at her.

Cicily had laughed at her, consistently, throughout the whole terrible ordeal of birth. Laughed at her as they stole from the Lakewood house with the elaborate precaution not to waken Stephen. Laughed at her in the motor in that hurried drive through the nocturnal boulevards, laughed at the sight of that beautifully furnished waiting-room, laughed even between ether gasps in her breathless struggle, the last few minutes before the twins had arrived. Laughed most of all, in the tranquillity of her narrow, ordered bed, as she lay with the newborn babies in her arms, and said, twinkling up at Jane’s joyful, relieved countenance:

“Well, if this is the curse of Eve, I don’t think so much of it! What have women been howling about down the ages? Why, it’s nothing⁠—it’s really nothing⁠—to go through for two babies!”

Jane had stood astounded at her courage. Her courage and her common sense⁠—the two great virtues of the rising generation. Freedom from sentimentality. Freedom from the old taboos that had shackled humanity for generations. Bravery and bravado⁠—they would take the rising generation far.

Cicily was lying, now, in the tranquillity of the ordered bed across the room from Jane. The room was a bower of flowers. Cicily was wearing a blue silk negligee that Muriel had sent her. Her lips were pale, but her eyes were bright and her dandelion head burned on the pillow like a yellow flame. She was holding a letter from Jack in her hands.

“I’m so happy, Mumsy,” she said. “He’ll be home in four weeks. Do you honestly think we can keep him from knowing it was twins until he gets here?”

“I honestly do,” smiled Jane.

“If Belle didn’t write Albert. She swears she didn’t.”

“I don’t believe she did,” smiled Jane.

“Poor Belle!” laughed Cicily. “She’s so envious of me⁠—with everything over.”

“It will be over for Belle next week,” smiled Jane.

“But it won’t be twins!” said Cicily proudly. “Not if there’s anything in the law of chances!”

“It probably won’t be twins,” smiled Jane.

“I’ve put it over Belle,” laughed Cicily, “all along the line. Jack’s twice as nice as Albert and my baby’s twice as many as hers!”

“Nevertheless,” said Jane, “I dare say Belle will continue to prefer her own husband and her own baby.”

“I suppose she will,” said Cicily, “but I prefer mine. Give them to me, Mumsy, before Miss Billings comes in. It’s almost time to nurse them.”

V

“Flora,” said Jane, “they’re the cutest things I ever saw! It was too dear of you to make them!”

“The last hats,” smiled Flora, “that I’ll ever make. I sold the goodwill of the shop today.”

“And you’re sailing Wednesday?” Jane passed the toast. She and Flora were having tea on the terrace. It was late in June. The first roses were beginning to bud. Flora had motored out for a farewell call. She had brought with her two little blue caps for the twins.

“Wednesday,” said Flora. “It nearly killed me, Jane, to close the house.”

“I know it did,” said Jane.

“I’m staying at the Blackstone,” said Flora. “The storage company took the furniture yesterday. I’ve sold the house to such a funny man⁠—his name’s Ed Brown. He’s a billboard king. He’s going to turn it into studios for his commercial artists.”

“I don’t see how you could do it,” said Jane.

“I wanted to do it,” said Flora. “I wanted to keep myself from ever coming back. I would have, you know, as long as the house was there. And yet I was miserable in it. You don’t know, Jane, how much I’ve missed Father.”

“Oh, yes, I do,” said Jane.

“At first, you know, I tried to keep busy with the hats and the war orphans. But I never saw the war orphans. And the hats⁠—Jane, it was the hats that made me realize that I was growing old.”

“But you’re not old!” cried Jane. Her protest was quite honest. Flora’s slim, fashionable figure seemed to her as young as ever. Her face had lost the blank and weary expression it had worn for the first years after her father’s death. In the sunlight of the terrace, the faint sheen of silver seemed only a highlight on her red-gold hair.

“I’m forty-three,” sighed Flora, “and I know I look it. I’ve known it from the moment I realized that I didn’t want to try on the hats any longer. At first I couldn’t wait to get them out of the boxes when they came from the customs-house. I used to put them all on and preen myself in front of the mirrors. But lately⁠—lately, Jane⁠—I didn’t seem to want to. At first I just said to myself that the new styles were trying. But pretty soon I knew⁠—I knew it was my face.”

“Flora!” cried Jane, in horror. “Don’t be ridiculous! You’re lovely looking. You always were!”

“You don’t understand, Jane,” said Flora accusingly. “You don’t care how you look. You never did.”

“I did, too!” cried Jane. “Of course, I know I never looked like much of anything⁠—”

“But you’re coming into your own, now, Jane,” said Flora, smiling. “The fourth decade is your home field. You’re going to spend the next ten years looking very happy and awfully amusing and pretty enough, while the beauties⁠—the beauties fade and frizzle or grow red and blowsy, and finally rot⁠—just rot and end up looking like exceptionally well-preserved corpses, fresh from the hand of a competent undertaker⁠—” Flora’s voice was really trembling. “So⁠—I’m going to Paris, Jane, where the undertakers are exceedingly competent and there’s some real life for middle-aged people. Here in Chicago what do I do but watch your children and Muriel’s and Isabel’s grow up and produce more children? It’s terrible, Jane, it’s really terrible⁠—” Again she broke off. “What are you and Isabel going to do with your mother?”

“She’s going on living in the old house with Minnie,” said Jane. “Of course, it’s dreadful there, now that the boulevard has gone through. Noisy and dirty and awfully commercial⁠—”

“And the elms all cut down,” said Flora sympathetically, “when they widened the street.”

“But Mamma likes it,” said Jane. “She likes the old house⁠—”

“And Isabel’s near her. She comes out here for the weekends. I don’t know what she’ll do when we go to Gull Rocks.”

“You’re going to Gull Rocks?” asked Flora.

“We have to,” said Jane. “We really have to, Stephen’s mother counts on it. And I’ve promised Cicily that she and Jack could have this house for the summer, while they’re deciding what to do. Stephen’s going to celebrate his fiftieth birthday by taking a two months’ vacation.”

“Why don’t you go abroad?” asked Flora.

“Stephen would rather sail that catboat,” smiled Jane.

“Jane, you’ve been a saint about Gull Rocks all these years,” said Flora earnestly. “I couldn’t stand it for a week.”

Yet Flora had stood Mr. Furness for twenty years, thought Jane. Stood that life, spent junketing about with a cribbage board in trains de luxe! Stood those expensive hotels in London and Paris and Rome and Madrid and Carlsbad and Biarritz and Dinard and Benares and Tokyo!

“You’ve been the saint, Flora!” said Jane.

As she spoke Molly appeared, pushing the double perambulator around the clump of evergreens at the foot of the garden. She paused beneath the apple tree, put on the brake, and sat down on the green bench. Molly was Cicily’s impeccable English nursemaid. She was infallible with the twins and very firm with Cicily. She liked Jane, however.

“Come and look at the babies,” said Jane.

The twins, very plump and pink and as alike as two pins, were blinking up at the June sunlight through the boughs of the apple tree. Molly had risen respectfully at Jane’s approach. She had beautiful British manners.

“Aren’t they funny?” said Flora. “They look so clean. And somehow so⁠—brand-new.”

“They are brand-new,” said Jane proudly. She stroked John Ward’s velvety cheek with a proprietary finger. He responded immediately with a vague, toothless, infinitely touching smile and a spasmodic gesture of his small pink-sweatered arms.

“Sometimes he has a dimple,” said Jane.

“They’re prettier than Belle’s little girl,” said Flora. “I hoped she was going to look like Muriel. But she doesn’t.”

“She looks like Belle,” said Jane. “Belle was a homely baby.”

“She’s lovely now,” said Flora.

“Oh, lovely,” said Jane.

“Cicily’s lovely, too,” said Flora.

“Yes,” said Jane.

“And so young,” said Flora wistfully.

“And so happy,” said Jane. “They’re both so happy since the boys came home.”

“Jane,” said Flora solemnly, as they turned to leave the garden, “do you find that looking at the younger generation makes you think of your own life?”

“Yes,” said Jane, a bit uncertainly.

“It makes me think of lost opportunities,” said Flora⁠—“chances that will never come again.” They strolled across the lawn for a moment in silence. Then Flora spoke once more, this time a trifle tremulously: “Do you know, Jane, that I’ve never been happy⁠—happy like that, I mean⁠—except for just the ten days that I was engaged to Inigo Fellowes.”

“I’m afraid,” said Jane slowly, as they ascended the terrace steps, “that no one’s ever happy like that for very long.”

“But for longer than ten days,” said Flora, still solemnly, “and maybe more than once. Inigo’s still very happy with his wife.”

“I didn’t know he had a wife,” said Jane.

“Oh, yes,” said Flora. “He’s been married for twelve years. I met him in Paris during the war, you know. He’d lost a leg and was being shipped back to Australia. He lives there now. He showed me a picture of his two sons.”

Jane wondered why Inigo had felt he had to do that. It seemed a bit unnecessary. Though Flora, no doubt, had been wonderful about them.

“You’ve had such a⁠—a normal life, Jane,” said Flora, as they ascended the terrace steps. “You’ve always been so happy with Stephen.”

“Yes,” said Jane evenly, “Stephen’s a darling.”

“And now you have the children⁠—to amuse you always.”

“Children,” said Jane doubtfully, “don’t always amuse you.”

“Don’t they?” said Flora. “I should think they would.”

“Well, they don’t,” said Jane.

She kissed Flora goodbye very tenderly in the front hall. She stood on the doorstep and watched her motor recede down the gravel path. The passing of Flora meant a great deal to Jane. She would miss her frightfully. Her oldest friend. Except Muriel, who was, of course, so much less⁠—less friendly. Not a friend like Agnes, of course. But Agnes was in New York. And now Flora would be in Paris. She might never see her again. With Stephen feeling the way he did about Gull Rocks, she might never go to Paris. Flora would meet André there. Flora would probably come to know André very well again⁠—

The striking of the clock in the hall behind her recalled Jane to a sense of the present. Six o’clock. Jenny ought to be home on the five-fifty. She was in town taking her College Entrance Board physics examination for Bryn Mawr. Jane was glad that she was going there. It had been hard to convince her that she should. Jenny cared very little for Bryn Mawr, but she cared even less for a social début. It was with the single idea of postponing that distressing event that Jenny had embraced the thought of a college education. Jenny was a girl’s girl, pure and simple. So unlike Cicily, who had always had a crowd of boys about the house⁠—But where was Cicily? She should be home that minute, nursing the twins. She was probably out on the golf links. Stephen and Jack would be back from the bank on the five-fifty. Jane had tried in vain to impress on Cicily the elementary fact that she ought to be home before Jack every evening. To precede your husband to the conjugal hearth at nightfall had always seemed to Jane the primary obligation of matrimony. But Cicily had said she should worry! Suddenly she whirled around the bushes at the entrance of the driveway in her little Ford roadster. Her hat was off and her yellow bob was blowing in the breeze.

“Just met Cousin Flora!” she called. She threw on her brakes. The Ford stopped in a whirl of gravel. Cicily sprang to the doorstep. “Is Jack home?” she cried. “Are the twins howling?” She was unbuttoning her blouse as she rushed into the hall. Jane followed her.

“Call Molly, will you, Mumsy? I’ve got to hurry! Gosh, Jack should be here! We’re dining in town, you know, this evening!”

Jane turned toward the living-room in quest of Molly.

“Cousin Flora told me about the bonnets!” called Cicily from the upper hall. “Bring them up, will you? I’ll look at them while I nurse the babies!”

The impeccable Molly had heard the Ford. She met Jane at the terrace doors. She had a twin tucked under each arm.

“I’m afraid Mrs. Bridges kept them waiting,” smiled Jane.

“Well⁠—you know how young mothers are, ma’am,” said Molly resignedly, and passed on through the living-room and up the stairs.

Jane was not sure she did know, half as well as Molly did. She closed the terrace doors to keep out the mosquitoes. Molly always left them open. Young mothers were rather perplexing to Jane. Cicily never worried about those babies and never watched over them. She left them entirely to Molly’s care. Molly did the watching and Jane did the worrying. Last week, for instance, when the supplementary bottle had not seemed to agree with little Jane, Molly had watched over formulas for hours and Jane had lain awake worrying for two whole nights. But Cicily had not been ruffled.

“It’s up to the doctor, Mumsy,” she said. “Babies always have their ups and downs. I can’t invent a formula.”

Courage and common sense, again, perhaps. Bravery and bravado. But it did seem a little heartless⁠—

The front door opened and Stephen and Jack and Jenny came in from the five-fifty.

“Jenny,” cried Jane, “how did the exam go?”

“Oh, all right,” said Jenny calmly; “but why should a girl know physics?”

Jack made a dive for the stairs.

“Golly!” he cried, “I’ve got to step on it! Where’s Cicily? Where are the kids?”

“In her room,” called Jane. She turned to smile at Stephen.

“That’s boy’s going to make a banker,” said Stephen proudly.

Jane slipped her arm around Jenny’s thin young shoulders.

“Do you really think you passed?” she inquired.

“Oh, I guess so,” said Jenny. She tossed her felt hat on the hall table and ran her hand through her straight blonde bob. Her plain little face was twinkling at her mother in an indulgent smile. “Don’t fuss, Mumsy!”

Just then little Steve burst in at the front door. He looked flushed and excited and just a trifle mussy in grass-stained flannels. Tennis racket in hand he towered lankily over Jane.

“Mumsy, can we have dinner early? Can we have it at half-past six?”

“I don’t think so,” said Jane, with a glance at the clock and a thought for the menu. Her eyes returned to her son. His blond, boyish beauty always made her heart beat a little faster. At fifteen he looked so much like Stephen⁠—the young Stephen that Jane had met in Flora’s ballroom. “Why?”

“Well, because I promised Buzzy Barker that I’d take her to the seven-thirty movie. I said I’d be there in the car at seven-fifteen. I can’t keep Buzzy waiting, Mumsy. I absolutely can’t! If we can’t have dinner early, I’ll have to go without it, but I’ve been playing tennis all afternoon, and I think when a man comes home tired at night and says he’d like to have dinner early⁠—”

Jane, Stephen, and Jenny burst simultaneously into laughter.

“Go vamp the cook, Steve,” said Jenny unsympathetically. “You’re a devil with women!”

Steve vanished, with a contemptuous snort in the direction of the pantry.

“He’s awful, Mumsy,” continued Jenny. “And Buzzy Barker is the arch-petter of her generation.”

“You’re all awful,” smiled Stephen, as he entered the living-room. “I don’t know how your mother puts up with you.”

Jane slipped her arm through his.

“Come out and look at the roses,” she said, “they’re lovely this time of day.”

Somehow it seemed to her at the moment that she put up with them all very easily. She had a normal life and children did amuse you! Arm in arm with Stephen she strolled across the terrace in the early evening air. A faint damp breeze was stealing in from the west⁠—the very breath of the swamps. An amber sunset light was flooding the Skokie Valley. It turned the terrace turf a vivid yellow green. It intensified the kaleidoscopic colours of the flower border. The roses looked redder and pinker than they did at high noon. Jane was thinking of defrauded Flora. She was wondering why she, herself, was ever discouraged about life. When she had Stephen and three funny children and two ridiculous grand-twins⁠—

“Do you remember the swamp this garden was sixteen years ago?” said Stephen suddenly.

Jane nodded solemnly.

“It was under this apple tree,” she said, “that I told you that I knew Steve was going to be a boy. And you kissed me, Stephen⁠—”

“I’ll kiss you again,” said Stephen handsomely, suiting the action to the words.

“Mumsy!” shrieked Steve from the pantry window. “Stop necking with Dad! Lena says we can have dinner at six-thirty! I absolutely can’t keep Buzzy waiting, Mumsy⁠—”

Jane slipped from Stephen’s arms.

“Come in and eat and keep him quiet,” she said tranquilly. Still arm in arm, they strolled back across the terrace. As they entered the living-room, Cicily’s voice was floating down the stairs.

“Where are those bonnets of Cousin Flora’s, Mumsy?”

“Jane,” said Stephen cheerfully, sinking into his armchair and opening the Evening Post, “this house is Bedlam.”

“I like it Bedlam,” said Jane, smiling. She picked up Flora’s bonnets from the living-room table and started with them toward the door. On the threshold she ran into Steve.

“Golly, Dad!” he was crying, aghast. “Don’t start to read the paper before dinner! I absolutely can’t keep Buzzy waiting⁠—”

Jane walked slowly up the stairs, smoothing out the frilly ruffles of Flora’s little blue bonnets. She could still hear Steve arguing incoherently with his father in the living-room.

On the first landing she caught the great guffaw of Jack’s laughter as he played with the twins on Cicily’s bed. Jenny was singing to the accompaniment of running water in the bathroom off her bedroom at the head of the stairs.

“Yes, sir, she’s my baby!
Tra-la⁠—I don’t mean maybe!”

Ignoring her brother’s views on early dinner, Jenny was obviously taking a tub. She had not bothered to close any doors.

There was nothing more satisfactory, thought Jane, as she knocked lightly at Cicily’s threshold, than a large, quarrelsome, and united family.

“Mumsy!” shouted Steve from the lower hall. “Dinner’s served!”

“Come in!” called Cicily shrilly, over Jack’s laughter.

“Jenny!” shouted Steve. “Come on down! Dinner’s ready!”

“Oh, shut up, Romeo!” shrieked Jenny affably, over the sound of running water.

Jane smiled indulgently as she opened Cicily’s door. There was a comfortable domestic sense of reassurance about a house that was Bedlam. Bedlam was exactly the kind of a house she liked.

VI

Jane sat on the brick parapet of her little terrace, wondering if the soft October air was too cool for her mother. It was a lovely autumn afternoon. An Indian summer haze hung over the tanned stretch of the Skokie Valley. The leaves of the oak trees were wine-red. A few scattered clumps of marigolds and zinnias that had withstood the early frost still splashed the withered flower border with patches of orange and rose.

Isabel and Robin had motored Mrs. Ward out for Sunday luncheon at Lakewood, and the sun was so warm and the terrace so sheltered and the last breath of summer so precious that Jane had suggested that they take their after-luncheon coffee in the open air. Mrs. Ward sat, her small black-garbed figure wrapped in the folds of a white Shetland shawl, sipping the hot liquid a shade gratefully. She was warming her thin, ringed hands on the outside of the little cup.

“Cold, Mamma?” asked Jane. “That shawl’s not very thick.”

“Certainly not,” said Mrs. Ward tartly. “I’m never cold.”

Jane’s eyes met Isabel’s. They were always incredibly touched by their mother’s perpetual, proud refusal to admit the infirmities of age. Infirmities that had seemed to creep insidiously upon her since her husband’s death, eight months before. That death had vividly emphasized for Jane and Isabel the menace of the years.

Robin and Stephen were casually dressed in tan tweeds for a country weekend. The three women were still in mourning. Their crude, black figures stood out uncompromisingly against the soft russet background of the October garden. The sombre badge of grief seemed to draw them closer together, to emphasize the family unit and their common loss. Nevertheless, it was still impossible for Jane to realize that her father was dead. That he would never again make one of the little group that was gathered that sunny afternoon on her terrace. Never again meet her eyes with his indulgent twinkle, half-veiled in cigar smoke, as Isabel and her mother rattled off their brittle, shameless, incisive comment on life. Never again help solve a family problem, like the one now under discussion. Isabel was discussing it, very incisively.

“I hate,” she said, “to have him give up his engineering.”

“He wants to give it up,” said Stephen eagerly.

“Not really,” said Isabel; “he just thinks he ought to. I wish he could go to Tech this winter. Cicily could take a little flat in Boston.”

“My dear,” said Robin seriously, “Jack ought to support his wife.”

“He’s only twenty-three,” sighed Isabel.

“He oughtn’t to have a wife,” put in Mrs. Ward, again rather tartly, “at his age.”

“But he has,” said Robin, “and he ought to support her.”

“He’s planned on engineering since he was a little boy,” said Isabel plaintively. “You know, Jane, I think it’s really up to Cicily. If she told him she’d like to live in Boston⁠—”

“I know,” said Jane, “but Cicily wouldn’t like to live in Boston. She’d like to buy that four-acre lot and build a little French farmhouse and live here in Lakewood while Jack worked in Stephen’s bank.”

“He’s awfully good in the bank,” said Stephen.

Isabel rose impatiently from her chair and walked across the terrace. She stared a moment in silence at the tanned stretch of meadow.

“He’s good at anything,” she said presently. Jane caught the sob that was trembling in her voice. “But he ought to have his chance.”

“I think myself,” said Jane seriously, “that Cicily’s making a mistake. But you know how it is, Isabel. She likes Lakewood. She’s made all her plans. She doesn’t want to go into exile.”

“Boston isn’t exile!” said Isabel, turning back to her chair.

“Thank you, Isabel!” threw in Stephen parenthetically.

“But Cicily thinks it is,” said Jane. “She’s never liked the Bostonians she met at Gull Rocks⁠—”

“I know how she feels,” said Robin generously. “No woman wants a husband who’s still in school. Besides, Isabel can’t support them. I mean⁠—we couldn’t give Cicily the things she’s accustomed to have. Jack made his decision when he married. He has a wife and two children. He can’t settle back on his father-in-law for a meal ticket. Stephen’s very generous to offer to build them that house and to give him such a good job in the bank.”

“I’m glad to have him there,” said Stephen warmly. “He’s a bright kid.”

“Just the same,” said Isabel, “Jack’s been building bridges since the age of ten. I can see him now with his first set of Meccano! He’ll be awfully bored with banking! He’ll never really like it.”

“Isabel,” said Mrs. Ward reprovingly, “you shouldn’t talk like that about banking.” Mrs. Ward had a solid Victorian respect for the source of her younger son-in-law’s income. Her remark was ignored, however. In the heat of family discussion, Jane reflected, it was becoming increasingly customary to ignore Mrs. Ward.

“He’ll like Cicily,” said Robin, “and the twins and the little French farmhouse. He’ll like the fun of starting out in life, on his own. He’ll like himself if he’s holding down an honest job.”

“Of course, I can understand,” said Isabel, “that Jane would like to have Cicily near her, now Steve’s at Hilton and Jenny’s in Bryn Mawr. I hate to give up Belle. But if it’s for Albert’s best good⁠—”

“How’s Jenny getting on?” inquired Robin abruptly. He had always admired his plain little niece.

“She loves it,” smiled Jane. And Jenny really did. Her unexpected enthusiasm for the cloisters had made Jane very happy. “She’s rooming in Pembroke with Barbara Belmont⁠—you know, the daughter of Stephen’s friend.”

“Really?” said Isabel, a trifle incredulously. “Belmont, the banker?” At heart, Jane knew, Isabel shared her mother’s Victorian confidence in banks.

“Yes,” said Jane. “He was in Stephen’s class at Harvard.”

“Such nice girls go to college nowadays,” mused Isabel. The note of incredulity still lingered in her voice. “Your friends were so queer, Jane.”

“They certainly were,” put in Mrs. Ward with a sigh.

A little flame of adolescent resentment flashed up in Jane’s heart. She felt as if she were fourteen once more and had just bumped up against one of Isabel’s and her mother’s “opinions.” At forty-two, however, resentment was articulate.

“I don’t know what was queer about them,” she said indignantly, “unless it was queer of them to be so very able. Agnes is one of the most successful dramatists on Broadway. Her new crime play’s a wow. And Marion Park has just been appointed Dean of Radcliffe.”

“Well, I never knew Marion Park,” said Isabel doubtfully.

“But certainly no one would ever have expected Agnes Johnson to amount to anything,” said Mrs. Ward.

As she spoke, the door to the living-room opened and Cicily came out on the terrace. She was wearing a little green sport suit and carrying a roll of blueprints in her hand. She shook her dandelion head and smiled charmingly at the assembled family.

“Oh, here you are!” she said pleasantly. “Isn’t it too cold for Granny? I want to show Uncle Robin the last plans for the house.” Unrolling a blueprint, she dropped down on her knees by his chair. Cicily still looked about fourteen years old, reflected Jane, tenderly. “We want to get it started before the ground freezes⁠—” she began. Looking up, she met her mother-in-law’s inimical eye. Something a little hard and indomitable glittered in Cicily’s own. She did not look fourteen years old any longer. “Oh, don’t tell me you’ve been arguing about it all over again!” she cried mutinously.

“My dear,” said Jane, “it’s not a thing to be lightly decided.”

“Who’s deciding it lightly?” cried Cicily hotly. “Mumsy, you make me tired.”

“Don’t talk like that, Cicily!” put in Mrs. Ward, and was again ignored.

“Aunt Isabel makes me tired!” continued Cicily. “I get so sick of all this family discussion! You act exactly as if I didn’t know what was good for Jack, myself! I’m his wife! I ought to know him by this time!”

“Cicily!” said Stephen warningly.

“Well, I do know him, Dad!” flashed Cicily, “and I’m acting for his best good! Where would engineering get him? Three years at Tech and then building bridges and tunnels and railroad embankments at some jumping-off place all the rest of his life! Me, boarding in construction camps with Molly and the twins! Not even with Molly! She wouldn’t go! What do we live for, anyway? He’s much better off in your bank, leading a civilized life in a city where everyone knows him!”

“Belle didn’t talk like that,” said Isabel reprovingly, “when Albert decided to go to Oxford.”

“Well, I shouldn’t think she would!” flashed Cicily again. “Oxford University isn’t Boston Tech! Aunt Muriel’s going to rent them a beautiful little house in that lovely country and Belle will meet a lot of distinguished people! I think Belle’s life is going to be perfectly grand! If Albert really does go into the diplomatic service. Belle will have a career! She may end up in the Court of Saint James! I’d love to be an ambassador’s lady⁠—”

“Albert’s not an ambassador yet, Cicily,” twinkled Stephen; “he’s just succeeded with some difficulty in becoming an Oxford undergraduate.”

“It’s a step in the right direction,” said Cicily. “I wish to goodness Jack had his ambition.”

“Jack has his own ambitions,” said Stephen quietly.

“He certainly has!” retorted Cicily, “and he ought to be protected from them! You can’t tell me anything about Jack, Dad! I think he’s just as sweet as you do. He’s worth ten of Albert! But just the same he’ll never get anywhere if I don’t push him. I’m pushing him now, just as hard as I can, into your bank! It’s a splendid opening!” She paused a trifle breathlessly, then smiled very sweetly at her father. “You know you think so yourself, Dad, darling.”

Jane watched Stephen try to steel himself against that smile, then reluctantly succumb to it.

“I wouldn’t offer Jack anything, Isabel,” he said slowly, “that I didn’t think was going to turn into a pretty good thing.”

“There!” cried Cicily in triumph, “and our house is going to be perfectly ducky⁠—”

“Cicily⁠—” began Isabel portentously. Then even Isabel obviously saw that argument was a waste of breath. “Let me see the blueprints,” she said helplessly.

Cicily surrendered them with a forgiving smile. She rose and looked interestedly over her mother-in-law’s shoulder.

“Do you think the linen closet is large enough?” she asked tactfully.

“No, I don’t,” said Isabel judicially, “and it ought to be nearer the clothes chute.”

“I’ll have it changed,” said Cicily generously. It was the generosity of the victor.

Jane rose slowly from her seat on the parapet. She could not do anything about Cicily. She could, however, go into the house and bring out Stephen’s overcoat to wrap around her mother. As she walked across the terrace, she could see Isabel bending interestedly over the blueprints! Poor old Isabel! It was quite obvious that she had laid down her arms.