“Break it?” tensely.

“Of course.  Their honor’s bigger than anything I could ever ask them.  And they know it.”

“Then you think that Derry ought to break his promise?”

“I do, indeed, my dear.”

“But—.  Oh, Mrs. Connolly, I don’t know whether I want him to break it.”

“Why not?”

With her face hidden.  “I don’t know whether I could let him—­go.”

“You’d let him go.  Never fear.  When the moment came, the good Lord would give you strength—­”

There were steps outside.  Jean leaned over and kissed Mary Connolly on the cheek.  “You are such a darling—­I don’t wonder that my mother loved you.”

“Well, you’ll always be more than just yourself to me,” said Mary.  “You’ll always be your mother’s baby.  And after I get lunch for you and the men I am going back to the church and ask the blessed Virgin to intercede for your happiness.”

So it was while Mary was at church, and the two men had gone to town upon some legal matter, that Jean, left alone, wandered through the house, and always before her flitted the happy ghost of the girl who had come there to spend her honeymoon.  In the great south chamber was a picture of her mother, and one of her father as they looked at the time of their marriage.  Her mother was in organdie with great balloon sleeves, and her hair in a Psyche knot.  She was a slender little thing, and the young doctor’s picture was a great contrast in its blondness and bigness.  Daddy had worn a beard then, pointed, as was the way with doctors of his day, and he looked very different, except for the eyes which had the same teasing twinkle.

The window of this room looked out over the orchard, the orchard which had been bursting with bloom when the bride came.  The trees now were slim little skeletons, with the faint gold of the western sky back of them, and there was much snow.  Yet so vivid was Jean’s impression of what had been, that she would have sworn her nostrils were assailed by a delicate fragrance, that her eyes beheld wind-blown petals of white and pink.

The long mirror reflecting her showed her in her straight frock of dark blue serge, with the white collars and cuffs.  The same mirror had reflected her mother’s organdie.  It, too, had been blue, Mary had told her, but blue with such a difference!  A faint forget-me-not shade, with a satin girdle, and a stiff satin collar!

Two girls, with a quarter of a century between them.  Yet the mother had laughed and loved, and had looked forward to a long life with her gay big husband.  They had had ten years of it, and then there had been just her ghost to haunt the old rooms.

Jean shivered a little as she went downstairs.  She found herself a little afraid of the lonely darkening house.  She wished that Mary would come.

Curled up in one of the big chairs, she waited.  Half-asleep and half-awake; she was aware of shadow-shapes which came and went.  Her Scotch great-grandfather, the little Irish great-grandmother; her copper-headed grandfather, his English wife, her own mother, pale and dark-haired and of Huguenot strain, her own dear father.