“They are so young still—­and they have lost their mother.  They would do very well in their classes here, if some kind woman would take them and look after them.  I felt, if the Miss Williams I heard of were really the Miss Williams I used to know, I could trust them to her, more than to any woman I ever knew.”

“Thank you.”  And then she explained that she had already two girls in charge.  She could say nothing till she had consulted them.  In the mean time—­

Just then the bell sounded.  The world was going on just as usual—­this strange, commonplace, busy, regardless world!

“I beg your pardon for intruding on your time so long,” said Mr. Roy, rising.  “I will leave you to consider the question, and you will let me know as soon as you can.  I am staying at the hotel here, and shall remain until I can leave my boys settled.  Good evening.”

Again she felt the grasp of the hand:  that ghostly touch, so vivid in dreams for these years, and now a warm living reality.  It was too much.  She could not bear it.

“If you would care to stay,” she said—­and though it was too dark to see her, he must have heard the faint tremble in her voice—­“our tea is ready.  Let me introduce you to my girls, and they can make friends with your little boys.”

The matter was soon settled, and the little party ushered into the bright warm parlor, glittering with all the appendages of that pleasant meal—­essentially feminine—­a “hungry” tea.  Robert Roy put his hand over his eyes as if the light dazzled him, and then sat down in the arm-chair which Miss Williams brought forward, turning as he did so to look up at her—­right in her face—­with his grave, soft, earnest eyes.

“Thank you.  How like that was to your old ways!  How very little you are changed!”

This was the only reference he made, in the slightest degree, to former times.

And she?

She went out of the room, ostensibly to get a pot of guava jelly for the boys—­found it after some search, and then sat down.

Only in her store closet, with her house-keeping things all about her.  But it was a quiet place, and the door was shut.

There is, in one of those infinitely pathetic Old Testament stories, a sentence—­“And he sought where to weep:  and he entered into his chamber and wept there.”

She did not weep, this woman, not a young woman now:  she only tried during her few minutes of solitude to gather up her thoughts, to realize what had happened to her, and who it was that sat in the next room—­under her roof—­at her very fireside.  Then she clasped her hands with a sudden sob, wild as any of the emotions of her girlhood.

“Oh, my love, my love, the love of all my life!  Thank God!”