“Why, mother, I have never heard you speak so strongly before—­”

At that moment Lena came searching through the hall, and knocking at the door of my room, next Peggy’s, to announce Lorraine.  The kind-hearted girl was with us constantly, and of the greatest unobtrusive solace to Peggy in those three days after our travellers had all gone, one after the other, like the fairy-tale family, at the chance word of Clever Alice.

It was on the fifth morning afterward, as I was sitting on the piazza hemming an organdie ruffle for my big little girl—­she does shoot up so fast—­that I heard on the gravel Charles’s footstep.

For some time after his arrival, as he sat, with his hat thrown off, talking lightly of his New York sojourn, I was so completely glad to see him, and to see him looking so well and in such buoyant spirits, that I could think of nothing else until he mentioned taking tea “At the Sign of the Three-legged Stool” with Lorraine’s sisters, with Lyman Wilde—­and with Aunt Elizabeth.

My work dropped out of my hands.

He laughed.  “Yes.  Dear mother, since you never have seen him, I don’t know that I can hope to convey any right conception of Wilde’s truly remarkable character.  He is, to begin with, the best of men.  Picture, if you can, a nature with a soul completely beautiful and selfless, and a nervous surface quite as pachydermatous and indiscriminating as that of an ox.  Wilde accepts everybody’s estimate of himself.  Not only the quality of his mercy, but also of his admiration, is quite unstrained.  So that he sees the friend of his youth not at all as I or any humanized perception at the Crafts Settlement would see her, but quite as she sees herself, as a fascinating, gifted, capricious woman of the world, beating the wings of her thwarted love of beauty against cruel circumstance.  I noticed his attitude as soon as I mentioned to him that Lorraine had by chance discovered that he and my aunt were old acquaintances.  He said that he would be very much interested in seeing her again.  As he happened at the moment to be looking over a packet of postals announcing his series of talks on ‘Script,’ he asked me her address, called his stenographer, and had it added to his mailing-list.  But before the postal reached her she had called him up to tell him she had lately heard of his work and of him for the first time after all these years, through Lorraine, and to ask him to come to see her.  His call, I am sure, they spent in a rich mutual misunderstanding as thoroughly satisfactory to both as any one could wish.  For, as I say, on my last visit in the Crafts neighborhood she was taking tea with all of them and Dr. Denbigh.”

“Dr. Denbigh!” I repeated, in surprise.  “Oh, Charles, are any of them not well?”

“No, no.  I think he’s been in New York”—­he gave a groan—­“on account of some delicate finesse on Maria’s part, some incomprehensible plan of hers for bringing Goward back here.  The worst of it is that, like all her plans, I believe it’s going to be perfectly successful.”