Mr. Lanley agreed a little more quickly than it was his habit to speak.

“O Mama, I think you’re so marvelous!” said Mathilde, and touched at her own words, she burst into tears.  Her mother put her arm about her, and Mr. Lanley patted her shoulder—­his sovereign care.

“There, there, my dear,” he murmured, “you must not cry.  You know Vincent has a very good chance, a very good chance.”

The assumption that he hadn’t was just the one Mathilde did not want to appear to make.  Her mother saw this and said gently: 

“She’s overstrained, that’s all.”

The girl wiped her eyes.

“I’m ashamed, when you are so calm and wonderful.”

“I’m not wonderful,” said her mother.  “I have no wish to cry.  I’m beyond it.  Other people’s trouble often makes us behave more emotionally than our own.  If it were your Pete, I should be in tears.”  She smiled, and looked across the girl’s head at Mr. Lanley.  “She would like to see him, Papa.  Telephone Pete Wayne, will you, and ask him to come and see her this evening?  You’ll be here, won’t you?”

Mr. Lanley nodded without cordiality; he did not approve of encouraging the affair unnecessarily.

“How kind you are, Mama!” exclaimed Mathilde, almost inaudibly.  It was just what she wanted, just what she had been wanting all day, to see her own man, to assure herself, since death was seen to be hot on the trail of all mortals, that he and she were not wasting their brief time in separation.

“We might take a turn in the motor,” said Mr. Lanley, thinking that Mrs. Wayne might enjoy that.

“It would do you both good.”

“And leave you alone, Mama?”

“It’s what I really want, dear.”

The plan did not fulfil itself quite as Mr. Lanley had imagined.  Mrs. Wayne was out at some sort of meeting.  They waited a moment for Pete.  Mathilde fixed her eyes on the lighted doorway, and said to herself that in a few seconds the thing of all others that she desired would happen—­he would come through it.  And almost at once he did, looking particularly young and alive; so that, as he jumped in beside her on the back seat, both her hands went out and caught his arm and clung to him.  Her realization of mortality had been so acute that she felt as if he had been restored to her from the dead.  She told him the horrors of the day.  Particularly, she wanted to share with him her gratitude for her mother’s almost magic kindness.

“I wanted you so much, Pete,” she whispered; “but I thought it would be heartless even to suggest my having wishes at such a time.  And then for her to think of it herself—­”

“It means they are not really going to oppose our marriage.”

They talked about their marriage and the twenty or thirty years of joy which they might reasonably hope to snatch from life.

“Think of it,” he said—­“twenty or thirty years, longer than either of us have lived.”