suppose," he said slowly, "that Laura is like her?"

"Laura?" Mrs. Tropenell could not keep the surprise out of her low voice. "Oh no, my dear, Laura is not in the least like her mother. But Laura's child is very like Alice--even now."

"Alice--my friend Alice--was full of buoyancy, of sympathy for every living thing. She possessed what I so much lacked in those days, and still alas! lack--sound common-sense. And yet she, too, had her ideals, ideals which did not lead her into a very happy path, for Robert Baynton, high-minded though he may have been, was absorbed in himself--there was no room for any one else." Had she been telling her story to anyone but her son, Mrs. Tropenell would have added, "Laura is very like him." Instead, she continued, "No one but Alice would have made Robert Baynton happy, or have made as good a thing of the marriage as she did--for happy they were. I think it was the sight of their happiness that made me at last long for something different, for something more normal in my life than that strange, unreal tie with St. Amant. So at last, when I was four-and-twenty, I married your father." 

Oliver remained silent, and she said a little tremulously, "He was very, very good to me. He made me a happy woman. He gave me _you_."

There was a long, long pause. Mrs. Tropenell had now come to what was the really difficult part of the task she had set herself.

"You are thinking, my boy, of _afterwards_." And as she felt him move restlessly, she went on pleadingly, "As to that, I ask you to remember that I was very lonely after your father died. Still, if you wish to know the real truth"--she would be very honest now--"that friendship which you so much disliked stood more in the way of your having a stepfather than anything else could have done."

"I see that now," he said sombrely, "but I did not see it then, mother."

"Even if Lady St. Amant had not lived on, as she did, all those years, I should not have married St. Amant--I think I can say that in all sincerity. So you see, Oliver, you need not have been afraid, when at last he became free."

She sighed a long, unconscious sigh of relief.

"I gather you still see him very often when he's at Knowlton Abbey?"

"Yes, it's become a very comfortable friendship, Oliver. But for St. Amant I should often feel very lonely, my 

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