Obviously, the watcher had not seen Sidney and Peter.  Her head was resting on her hand, and her heavy eyes were fixed upon some sombre inner vision that was hers alone.

Mary crossed behind the house, and, as they came up through the shrubbery, met Sidney and his son at the side door.  Sidney’s face was tired, but radiant with a mysterious content.  Peter looked white—­awed.  He was clinging with both small brown hands to one of his father’s firm, big ones.

“I know what you’re going to say, Mary,” said Sidney, in a tone curiously gentle, and with his oddly bright smile.  “I know she’s there.  But we’re going to her now, and it’s all right.  Peter and I have been talking it over.  I saw her there, Mary, and it was like a blow!  She’s not the one who must suffer for all this.  Peter and I are going to start all over again, and settle our troubles without hurting a woman; aren’t we, Peter?”

The little boy nodded, with his eyes fixed on his father’s.

“So the episode is closed, Mary,” said Sidney, simply.  “And the next time—­if there is a next time!—­Peter shall make his own decision, and abide by what it brings.  The mug goes back to its place to-night, and—­and we’re going to tell mother that she never need watch and wait and worry about us again!”

They turned to the steps; but, as the boy ran ahead, Sidney came back to say in a lower tone: 

“I—­it may be weakness, Mary, but I can’t have Jean doing what—­what she did, you know!  I tried to give the boy some idea, just now, of the responsibility of it.  Nobody spared my grandmother, but Jean shall be spared, if I never try to control him or save him from himself again!”

“Ah, Sidney,” Mary said, “you have done more, in taking him into your confidence, than any amount of punishing could do!”

“Well, we’ll see!” he said, with a weary little shrug.  “I must go to Jeanie now.”

As he mounted the steps, Peter reappeared in the darkened doorway.  The child looked like a little knight, with his tawny loose mop of hair and short tunic, and the uplifted look in his lovely eyes.

“Shall we go to her now, Dad?” said the little treble gallantly.  And, as the boy came close to Sidney’s side, Mary saw the silver mug glitter in his hand.

MAKING ALLOWANCES FOR MAMMA

At the head of her own breakfast table,—­a breakfast table charmingly littered with dark-blue china and shining glass, and made springlike by a great bowl of daisies,—­Mary Venable sat alone, trying to read her letters through a bitter blur of tears.  She was not interested in her letters, but something must be done, she thought desperately, to check this irresistible impulse to put her head down on the table and cry like a child, and uninteresting letters, if she could only force her eyes to follow the lines of them, and her brain to follow the meaning, would be as steadying to the nerves as anything else.