On her way to her room that night Grace Cardew encountered Mademoiselle, a pale, unhappy Mademoiselle, who seemed to spend her time mostly in Lily’s empty rooms or wandering about corridors.  Whenever the three members of the family were together she would retire to her own quarters, and there feverishly with her rosary would pray for a softening of hearts.  She did not comprehend these Americans, who were so kind to those beneath them and so hard to each other.

“I wanted to see you, Mademoiselle,” Grace said, not very steadily.  “I have good news for you.”

Mademoiselle began to tremble.  “She is coming?  Lily is coming?”

“Yes.  Will you have some fresh flowers put in her rooms in the morning?”

Suddenly Mademoiselle forgot her years of repression, and flinging her arms around Grace’s neck she kissed her.  Grace held her for a moment, patting her shoulder gently.

“We must try to make her very happy, Mademoiselle.  I think things will be different now.”

Mademoiselle stood back and wiped her eyes.

“But she must be different, too,” she said.  “She is sweet and good, but she is strong of will, too.  The will to do, to achieve, that is one thing, and very good.  But the will to go one’s own way, that is another.”

“The young are always headstrong, Mademoiselle.”

But, alone later on, her rosary on her knee, Mademoiselle wondered.  If youth were the indictment against Lily, was she not still young?  It took years, or suffering, or sometimes both, to break the will of youth and chasten its spirit.  God grant Lily might not have suffering.

It was Grace’s plan to say nothing to Lily, but to go for her herself, and thus save her the humiliation of coming back alone.  All morning housemaids were busy in Lily’s rooms.  Rugs were shaken, floors waxed and rubbed, the silver frames and vases in her sitting room polished to refulgence.  And all morning Mademoiselle scolded and ran suspicious fingers into corners, and arranged and re-arranged great boxes of flowers.

Long before the time she had ordered the car Grace was downstairs, dressed for the street, and clad in cool shining silk, was pacing the shaded hall.  There was a vague air of expectation about the old house.  In a room off the pantry the second man was polishing the buttons of his livery, using a pasteboard card with a hole in it to save the fabric beneath.  Grayson pottered about in the drawing room, alert for the parlor maid’s sins of omission.

The telephone in the library rang, and Grayson answered it, while Grace stood in the doorway.

“A message from Miss Lily,” he said.  “Mrs. Doyle has telephoned that Miss Lily is on her way here.”

Grace was vaguely disappointed.  She had wanted to go to Lily with her good news, to bring her home bag and baggage, to lead her into the house and to say, in effect, that this was home, her home.  She had felt that they, and not Lily, should take the first step.