Perhaps Mother had dreaded her girl’s home-coming, in a way, almost as much as she yearned for it.  But if she had, Mary Alice never knew it; and if she had, Mother herself soon forgot it.  For in all the twenty years of Mary Alice’s life, her mother had never, it seemed, had so much of her girl as in the month that followed her home-coming.  Hour after hour they worked about the house or sat before that grate fire in the unchanged sitting-room, and talked and talked and talked.  Mary Alice told every little detail of those four months until her mother lived them over with her and the light and life of them animated her as they had animated Mary Alice.

Little by little, in that month, Mary Alice came at least to the beginning of a wonderful new understanding:  came to see how parents—­and godparents!—­cease to have any particular future of their own and live in the futures of the young things they love.  Mary Alice’s bleak years had been bitter for her mother, too; perhaps bitterer than for her.  And her new enchantment with life was like new blood in her mother’s veins.

Mother cried when Mary Alice told her the Secret.  “Oh, it’s true! it’s true!” she said.  “If only everybody could know it, what a different world this would be!”

And as for the—­Other!  When Mary Alice told her mother about him and what his coming into her life and his going out of it had meant, Mother just held her girl close and could not speak.

The precious month flew by on wings as of the wind.  Mary Alice was “the town wonder,” as her brother Johnny said, and she enjoyed that as only a girl who has been the town wall-flower can; but after all, everything was as nothing compared with Mother and the exultation that had so evidently come into her life because out of her love and pain and sacrifice a soul had come into the world to draw so richly from the treasures of other hearts and to give so richly back again.  There is no triumph like it, as Mary Alice would perhaps know, some day.  A mother’s purest happiness is very like God’s own.

But at last the sailing date was close at hand.  Mary Alice’s heart was heavy and glad together.  “If I could only take you!” she whispered to her mother.

Mother shook her head.  “I wouldn’t go and leave your father and the children,” she said.  “You go and enjoy it all for me.  I like it better that way.”

And so, once more Mary Alice smiled through tear-filled eyes at the dear faces on the station platform, and was gone again into the big world beyond her home.  But this time what a different girl it was who went!

X

THE OLD WORLD AND THE KING

They had an unusually delightful voyage.  The weather was perfection and their fellow-voyagers included many persons interesting to talk with and many others interesting to observe and speculate about.