“I must have a manicure at once,” she said to herself irrelevantly, though the heart of her was yearning toward Jack’s room upstairs.  She wanted to go up and lie down on Jack’s bed; and put her head on Jack’s pillow.  It seemed to her that it would bring her a little closer to Jack.  And then she had a swift vision of Taylor Rock, where Jack was said to have his cave.  She closed her eyes and shuddered.  She could not get close to Jack—­she had never been close to him, since he passed babyhood.  Perhaps....  The girl, Marion—­had Jack loved her?  She was grown used to the jealousy that filled her when she thought of Marion.  She forced herself now to think pityingly of the girl, dead up there in that awful snow.

She went upstairs, forgetting to telephone to the maids as she had intended.  She moved slowly, apathetically, pausing long before the closed door of Jack’s room.  She would not go in, after all.  Why dig deeper into the grief that must be mastered somehow, if she would go on living?  She remembered the maids, and when she had put on one of her soft, silk house gowns that she used to like so well, she went slowly down the stairs, forgetting that she had a telephone in her room, her mind swinging automatically to the one in the hall that she had used as she came in.  She had just reached it when the doctor came hurrying up the steps and pressed the bell button.  She saw him dimly through the curtained glass of the door, and frowned while she let him in.  And then—­

She knew that the doctor was propelled violently to one side by some one coming behind him, and she knew that she was dreaming the rest of it.  The feel of Jack’s arm around her shoulders, and Jack’s warm, young lips on her cheeks and her lips and her eyelids, and the sound of Jack’s voice calling her endearing pet names that she had never heard him speak while she was awake and he was with her—­It was a delicious dream, and Mrs. Singleton Corey smiled tremulously while the dream lasted.

“Gee, I’d like to give you a real old bear-hug, but I’ve got a bum wing and I can’t.  Gee, we musta passed each other on the road somewhere, because I was streaking it down here to see you—­gee, but you look good to me!—­and you were streaking it up there to see me—­” The adorable young voice hesitated and deepened to a yearning half-whisper.  “Did you go away up there just because you—­wanted to see me?  Did you do that, mother?  Honest?”

Mrs. Singleton Corey snapped into wakefulness, but she still leaned heavily within her curve of Jack’s good arm.  Her eyes—­brown, and very much like Jack’s—­stared up with a shining, wonderful gladness into his face.  But she was Mrs. Singleton Corey, and she would not act the sentimental fool if she could help it!

“Yes, I—­thought I should have to dig you out of a snowdrift, you—­young—­scamp!”

“She’d a done it, believe me!  Only I wasn’t in any snowdrift, so she couldn’t—­God love her!” He was half crying all the while and trying to hide it; and half laughing, too, and altogether engrossed in the joy of being able to hold his own mother like that, just as he had hungered to do up there on the mountain.