“I wonder if they will think they ought to sit by themselves evenings,” she reflected.  She looked at the girl’s slight grace in the bed, and the little, dark head sunken in the pillow, and she wondered how in the world the mother of a girl like that could stay one minute in Kentucky and leave her.  “She must be a pretty woman!” she thought to herself.  Already she hated the other mother-in-law, and she felt almost a maternal right to the girl.  She recalled what she had seen the night before, and thrills of tender reminiscence came over her.  “Randolph will make just such a good husband as his father,” she thought to herself, and then she rather resented his superior right over the girl, as she might have done if it had not been a question of her own son, and Charlotte had been her own daughter.  She loved her as she loved the daughter she had never had.  She stroked her hair softly as it curled over the pillow.

“You have such pretty hair, dear,” she said, with positive pride.  The little, flushed face looked up at her.

Charlotte had just finished her breakfast.  Anderson had brought the telegram and gone, and the two were alone.  It was arranged that Charlotte was to get up in an hour, and that Mrs. Anderson was to go home with her in one of Samson Rawdy’s coaches.

“We will take my maid, and she can get the furnace fire started,” she said, “and help about the dinner.”

“I had such a nice dinner all ready last night,” Charlotte said, “and I am afraid it must be spoiled now.”

“Never mind.  We will get another,” said Mrs. Anderson.

Both Anderson and his mother had succeeded in quieting Charlotte’s lingering fears concerning her father.

“He probably got stunned,” Anderson said; “and he cannot be very bad or he would not be coming home on the noon train.”  He was talking to Charlotte from his mother’s room, with the door ajar.

There was something conclusive in Anderson’s voice which reassured Charlotte.

“My son would not say so unless he thought so,” said Mrs. Anderson.  “He never says a thing he does not mean.”  She spoke with a double meaning which Charlotte wholly missed.  It had not occurred to her that Mr. Anderson would have taken her in his arms last night and kissed her and comforted her, if he had not been thoroughly in earnest and in love with her.  She supposed, of course, he wished to marry her.  All that troubled her was her own course in practically proposing to him.  Presently, after she and Mrs. Anderson were alone together, she tried to say something about this to the other woman.

“I don’t know as I ought to have come here last night,” she said, “but—­”

“Where else would you have gone?” inquired Mrs. Anderson.

Charlotte looked up at her piteously.  “I hope Mr. Anderson didn’t think I—­I—­ought not to,” she whispered, and she felt her cheeks blazing with shame.  She did not know if Mrs. Anderson really knew, but she was as much ashamed.