“Oh, how solemn!  Good-night, my dears!  A kiss to every one of you!”

She folded her letter with the rest, and then she quickly squeezed them all into a large envelope, which she addressed to Miss Barbara Wells, Bismarck, North Dakota.  Ethel’s eyes were very bright.  She sniffed a little and smiled at herself.  “Oh, don’t be a baby!  It’s all over now, you know—­I mean it’s just beginning!”

She stopped for a moment by the table, with the letter in her hand, and looked down at Amy’s picture.  “That is all any one needs to know.”

Her look was pitying, tender, but a little curious, too.

“I wonder what you were like at my age!  I wonder what you went through, poor dear? . . .  But it’s over now—­all over.  All we don’t like will fade away, and you’ll grow so beautiful again.  Susette will love her mother. . . .  But she won’t be just like you, my dear.”

Ethel went slowly out of the room.  At the doorway she switched off the light, and the bare, empty room was left in the dark.  The photograph was invisible now.  On the street below, a motor stopped; and there was a murmur of voices, a laugh.  Tomorrow somebody else would be here.

THE END