“Oh, Mother Graham,” I protested, “please don’t look at it that way.  You know how careful you have to be about your heart.  We couldn’t let you undertake the task of nursing me, it would have been too much for you.”

“Well, if your own mother were alive I don’t believe any one could have kept her from taking care of you,” she returned stubbornly.

There was a wistful note in her voice that touched and enlightened me.  Beneath all the crustiness of my mother-in-law’s disposition there must lie a very real regard—­I tremulously wondered if I might not call it love—­for me.

My heart warmed toward the lonely, crabbed old woman as it had never done before.  I put out my uninjured hand, clasped hers, and drew her toward me.

“Mother dear,” I said softly, “please believe me, it would be no different if my own little mother were here.  She, of course, would want to take care of me, but her frailness would have made it impossible.  And I want you to know that I appreciate all your kindness.”

She bent to kiss me.

“I’m a cantankerous old woman, sometimes,” she said quaveringly, “but I am fond of you, Margaret.”

She released me so abruptly and went out of the room so quickly that I had no opportunity to answer her.  But I lay back on my pillows, warm with happiness, filled with gratitude that in spite of the many controversies in which my husband’s mother and I had been involved, and the verbal indignities which she had sometimes heaped upon me, we had managed to salvage so much real affection as a basis for our future relations with each other.

The reference to my own little mother, which I had made, brought back to me the homesickness, the longing for her which comes over me often, especially when I am not feeling well.  When Lillian returned she found me weeping quietly.

“Here, this will never do!” she said kindly, but firmly.  “I’m not going to ask you what you were crying about, for I haven’t time to listen.  I must fix you up to see two visitors.  But”—­she forestalled the question I was about to ask—­“before you see one of them I must tell you that Harry and I have about come to the parting of the ways.”

“The parting of the ways!” I gasped.  “Harry and you?”

Lillian Underwood nodded as calmly as if she had simply announced a decision to alter a gown or a hat, instead of referring to a separation from her husband.

“It will have to come to that, I am afraid,” she said, and looking more closely at her I saw that her calmness was only assumed, that humiliation and sadness had her in their grip.

“I have always feared that when the time came for me to be ’my honest self’ instead of a ‘made-up daisy’”—­she smiled wearily as she quoted the childish rhyme—­“Harry would not be big enough to take it well.  Of course I could and would stand all his unpleasantness concerning my altered appearance, but the root of his actions goes deeper than that, I am afraid.  He dislikes children, and I fear that he will object to my having my little girl with me.  And if he does—­”