Up-stairs, unable to lie down till she came back, I put on a little cambric sack and sat by the window waiting till I should hear her foot on the stairs again.  “Charles is telling her,” I said to Cyrus.  He was walking up and down the room, dumb with impatience and disgust, too pained for Peggy, too tried by his own helplessness to rest or even to sit still.  In a way it has all been harder for him than for any one else.  His impulses are stronger and deeper than my dear girl’s, and far less cool.  She is very especially precious to him; and, whether because she looks so like him, or because he thinks her ways like my own, her youth and her fortune have always been at once a more anxious and a more lovely concern with him than any one else’s on earth.  She is, somehow, our future to him.

While we waited here in this anxiety up-stairs, down in the garden I could hear not the words, but the tones of our children as they spoke together.  Charles’s voice sounded first for a long time, with an air of calmness and directness; and Peggy answered him at intervals of listening, answered apparently less with surprise at what he told her than in a quiet acceptance, with a little throb of control, and then in accord with him.  Then it was as though they were planning together.

In the still village night their voices sounded very tranquil; after a little while, even buoyant.  Peggy laughed once or twice.  Little by little a breath of relief blew over both her father’s solicitude and mine.  It was partly from the coolness and freshness of the out-door air, and the half-unconscious sense it often brings, that beyond whatever care is close beside you at the instant there is—­and especially for the young—­so much else in all creation.  Then, for me, there was a deep comfort in the knowledge that in this time of need my children had each other; that they could speak so together, in an intimate sympathy, and were, not only superficially in name, but really and beautifully, a brother and sister.

At last, as they parted at the gate, Charles said, in a spirited, downright tone:  “Stick to that, cling to it, make it your answer to everything.  It’s all you now know and all you need to know, and you’ll be as firm on it as on a rock.”

The lamplight from the street filtering through the elm leaves glimmered on Peggy’s bright hair as she looked up at him.  Her eyelashes were wet, but she was laughing as she said:  “But, of course, I have to cling to it.  It’s the truth.  Good-night!  Good-night!” And her step on the stairs was light and even skipping.

On the next morning, when I knocked at her door to find whether she would rather breakfast up-stairs, I saw at once she had slept.  She stood before the mirror fastening her belt ribbon, and looking so lovely it seemed impossible misfortune should ever touch her.

“Why, mother dear, you aren’t dressed for the library-board meeting!  Isn’t that this morning?”