When, on turning in at the gate of Tory Hill, she saw a taxicab standing below the steps of the main entrance, she was not surprised, since Ashley occasionally took one to run out from town.  But when a little lady in furs and an extravagant hat stepped out to pay the chauffeur Olivia stopped to get her breath.  If it hadn’t been impossible she would have said—­

But the taxicab whizzed away, and the little lady tripped up the steps.

Olivia felt herself unable to move.  The motor throbbed past her, and out the gate, but she still stood incapable of going farther.  It seemed long before the pent-up emotions of the last month or two, controlled, repressed, unacknowledged, as they had been, found utterance in one loud cry:  “Aunt Vic!”

Not till that minute had she guessed her need of a woman, a Guion, one of her very own, a mother, on whose breast to lay her head and weep her cares out.

* * * * *

The first tears since the beginning of her trials came to Olivia Guion, as, with arms clasped round her aunt and forehead pressed into the little old lady’s furs, she sat beside her on a packing-case in the hail.  She cried then as she never knew before she was capable of crying.  She cried for the joy of the present, for the trouble of the past, and for the relief of clinging to some one to whom she had a right.  Madame de Melcourt would have cried with her, had it not been for the effect of tears on cosmetics.

“There, there, my pet,” she murmured, soothingly.  “Didn’t you know your old auntie would come to you?  Why didn’t you cable?  Didn’t you know I was right at the end of the wire.  There now, cry all you want to.  It’ll do you good.  Your old auntie has come to take all your troubles away, and see you happily married to your Englishman.  She’s brought your dot in her pocket—­same old dot!—­and everything.  There now, cry.  There’s nothing like it.”

XXII

Madame de Melcourt the chief novelty of American life, for the first few days at least, lay in the absence of any necessity for striving.  To wake up in the morning into a society not keeping its heart hermetically shut against her was distinctly a new thing.  Not to have to plan or push or struggle, to take snubs or repay them, to wriggle in where she was not wanted, or to keep people out where she had wriggled in, was really amusing.  In the wide friendliness by which she found herself surrounded she had a droll sense of having reached some scholastic paradise painted by Puvis de Chavannes.  She was even seated on a kind of throne, like Justitia or Sapientia, with all kinds of flattering, welcoming attentions both from old friends who could remember her when she had lived as a girl among them and new ones who were eager to take her into hospitable arms.  It was decidedly funny.  It was like getting into a sphere where all the wishes were gratified and there were no more