Before Louise had risen on the following morning Laura entered her bedroom and handed her an unopened cablegram. Louise tore open the envelope with trembling hands. She had no means of surmising the character of the message. Blythe had been purposely evasive in replying to Louise's questions as to whether her mother had looked ill when he had last seen her, for he disliked to be the bearer of disquieting news. His private report to Laura, however, as to the obvious state of Mrs. Treharne's health had been sufficiently alarming to cause Laura to lie awake a good part of the night, meditating as to whether she should tell Louise. Laura had read Mrs. Treharne's letter to Louise, announcing her departure from the house on the Drive for an undetermined destination; and this complicated the situation and was the reason why Laura withheld from Louise what Blythe had told her about her mother's gravely-declining health. Since the receipt of that letter no message had reached Louise from her mother, giving her address; and Laura had not elected to alarm the girl needlessly while Mrs. Treharne's address remained unknown.

The cablegram took the problem out of Laura's hands. It was dated from Saranac, in the Adirondacks, and read:

"Am ill. Come immediately. Mother."

Louise handed the message to Laura and rose at once. She found it very natural that, at such a moment, she should lean upon the resourcefulness of John Blythe.

"I suppose John can arrange for our passage?" she said to Laura.

"John," replied Laura, confidently, "can do anything, I think, even to obtaining accommodations on a New-York-bound steamer in July, which is next to impossible."

Laura immediately telephoned to Blythe at the Carlton, telling him of the summons Louise had received from her mother.

"Of course I am to go with her," said Laura, "and equally of course we shall have a dreadful time getting steamer accommodations at this season."

"Probably I can manage," was Blythe's prompt reply. "The Mauretania, which brought me over, is returning day after tomorrow. I know she is booked to the gun'ls—but I'll see what can be done. Of course I am going, too. I'll see you by noon and let you know."

Jermyn Scammel and his two companions who had been witnesses of Blythe's meeting with Jesse at the Curzon Street house were staying at the Carlton, and Blythe knew that they had reserved accommodations on the Mauretania. Blythe found them at breakfast in Scammel's rooms and he told them of the quandary in which two American ladies found themselves owing to the extreme difficulty of securing passage on board West-bound steamers at that season.

"Anybody I know, Blythe?" Scammel asked him.

"I think so," said Blythe. "Mrs. Laura Stedham is—"

"Laura Stedham? Known her all my life—tried my infernallest to marry her when I was a cub, but she wouldn't so much as look at me," said Scammel, cheerily. "She can have my cabin if I have to stay over here for the remainder of my natural life. How about you fellows?" addressing his companions.

It was all one to them, it appeared. If Scammel was willing to remain in London for a while longer, why—

"But I haven't the least idea of remaining in London," put in Scammel when they had got that far. "The night train for Paris for mine, now that I can't get away on the Mauretania. No use talking, Blythe, fate is against me. I want to be good, but I'm not allowed to be. I'll leave it to you or anybody else if I had the slightest idea of making Paris this trip. I've been fighting the temptation to hit up Paris ever since I've been over this time. Now, you see, I'm positively driven to it. Man comes along and grabs my homeward-bound cabin away from me. What else is there for it but Paris? Are you cubs going along with me?" turning to the two younger men.

The "cubs," it appeared, were quite willing to defer their meditated repentance until such time as Scammel might be ready to repent with them, and they proclaimed that Paris sounded good to them. Thus it was that Blythe was able to appear at the Savoy long before noon with the announcement that he had contrived to obtain three highly-desirable staterooms on the Mauretania.

"What should we ever have done without him?" said Laura to Louise, while Blythe lounged about—making occasional discreet exits—during their packing operations.

"Without Jerry Scammel and the two apt and obliging young New York pupils he is breaking in over here, you should say," observed Blythe.

"John! Was it dear old Jerry Scammel who did this for us?" asked Laura, blushing. "Well, I shall certainly bake him a cake or crochet him a pair of pulse-warmers or ear-laps or something as soon as he gets back to New York. He's a dear, and always was, and I always fight tooth and nail for him when the catty old dowagers call him the most dissipated man in New York. Jerry, to this day, declares to me, every time I meet him, that he holds the world's record for proposals to the same girl within a given time. I was the girl. I believe I was somewhat under sixteen and Jerry was not yet nineteen. He swears that he proposed to me forty-four times within one month. Of course he is wrong. It was only twenty-three."

Laura and Blythe purposely kept up this sort of small talk to divert Louise's thoughts from her mother's illness. Louise, heavy-hearted as she was, quite understood their kindly purpose, and successfully strove to appear entertained by their banter. But her foreboding was not easy to dispel. She knew that her mother would not have summoned her if her illness had not been of the gravest character; for in her last letter—the one she wrote on the night before leaving New York—she had insisted upon Louise having her London visit out. The girl had been filled with an intense happiness upon reading her mother's announcement of her departure from the house on the Drive. She had pictured a happy reunion with her mother and had begun immediately to make plans for the home which they should have together upon her return to New York. So that her mother's summons and Louise's certainty that the summons would never have been made had her mother's condition not been very serious, bore heavily upon her.

"I begin to fear that I have found my mother only to lose her again," she had said to Laura in talking over the cable message; and Laura, while professing to be shocked at Louise's premonition, had turned away to hide her tears; for the same premonition, better-grounded than Louise's on account of what she had heard from Blythe as to the visible decline into which Mrs. Treharne had seemed to be falling, was depressing Laura.

The steamer made an unseasonably squally and heavy passage of it, and Laura, who had never been intended for a Vikingess, as she expressed it, kept to her stateroom almost throughout the voyage. Louise and Blythe were among the few on board the crowded steamer who did not shrink even once from mess call, which is the test of the born voyager. They kept pace with the most hardened constitutional-takers on deck every day, and were together almost constantly.

Louise Treharne and John Blythe already knew that they loved each other. On board the steamer, and for five days running, rarely out of each other's company, both found that, humanly speaking, they also genuinely liked each other. Even men and women entirely devoted to each other quite commonly develop a certain pettishness often verging upon actual irascibility when they find themselves incessantly in each other's company on board a steamer. Louise and Blythe, despite the unfriendliness of the elements and the consequent discomforts of the passage, both felt quite lost and miserable when they were separated from each other even for short periods during the voyage. Louise, in her inexperience, did not seek to analyze this phenomenon. But Blythe did.

"She is as fine-grained as she is beautiful, Laura," he said to that ever-receptive confidante, when he found himself alone with her for a moment one day toward the end of the voyage. "I have, as of course you know, no particular amount of sweetness of disposition at sea or anywhere else. But, somehow, I have been a marvel of beatific mildness and contentment ever since we left England. There's only one way to account for that. Louise is temperamentally perfect."

"Charming, but wholly wrong," replied Laura. "Louise is magnificently deficient in the thing called 'temperament'—thank Heaven! Did you ever happen to encounter a female who delighted in calling herself a 'woman of temperament,' John Blythe? Then you know how hopelessly impossible a woman of that sort is, considered as a companion for any normal human being of either sex. If Louise had been temperamental—any kind of temperamental—I am certain that you two would be passing each other on deck without even nodding by this time. But the dear is just a sweet girl-woman with a wholesome imagination and human impulses, and I myself, a woman (and a fussy one, too, sometimes!), could live with her forever without a symptom of friction. You are a very lucky rising young legal person. I don't know what I shall do without her."

"Without her—when?" said Blythe, his surprise genuine. "You are going up to the Adirondacks with her, aren't you?"

"To be sure," replied Laura. "I mean that I don't know what I shall do without her when—" She broke off in momentary confusion. "Oh, you are impossibly opaque today, John," she finished, smiling illuminatingly.

"Oh—that!" said Blythe, enlightened, yet a bit rueful.

It was precisely "that" which, as the steamer drew near New York was causing Blythe no little disquietude. He knew that he would miss Louise acutely after the delightful intimacies of the voyage. No word as to their tacit relationship had been spoken by Blythe since they had thus been thrown almost constantly together. A natural delicacy had deterred him from touching upon that subject at a time when Louise was hurrying to the bedside of her mother. But, now that the steamer was less than half a day from New York, he began to draw a desolate picture of his lonesome state when he should bid goodbye to Louise at the station. Her vigil at her mother's bedside might be a protracted one. He remembered, not without a shock of astonishment, that he had never asked Louise to be his wife. When he mentally retraced the path, he found it easy enough to understand why he had not put this question to her. Nevertheless, the fact that she was by no means plighted to him had caused him a vague uneasiness since the beginning of the voyage; and, now that their separation, for an indeterminate period, impended, he found himself swept by a desire to make their mutual understanding—if such, indeed, he thought nervously, Louise really took it to be—more explicit, if not more binding.

It chanced that Louise herself furnished him his opportunity to speak. She had written a wireless message of greeting to her mother, to be transmitted from New York to Saranac, and they watched the operator as he flared the message over the waste of tumbling waters.

"I told her in the message that you are with us," Louise said to him. "And of course she shall know, when I see her, that Laura and I might have had to remain in England indefinitely had it not been for you."

"There is something that I want your sanction to tell your mother when I see her," said Blythe as they set out for a stroll on the long deck.

"Yes?" she said, with a quick sidewise glance at him. She understood perfectly well what he meant; had, indeed, been waiting for him to assume that direction; but women are not expected to make such admissions.

"I think you will be ready to admit that I have striven to practise self-restraint," said Blythe, with a smile in which there was a touch of nervousness. "But there is a point beyond which I cannot go. Are you to tell your mother that I have asked you to marry me, or am I to tell her when I see her?"

"Have you asked me that?" inquired Louise, a little mischievously; but she asked the question in order to gain time.

Blythe laughed in self-deprecation.

"If I have been guilty of so stupid an omission, I can rectify it by asking you now?" he said; and Louise noticed the flush that overspread his features. "I have, I know, a habit of taking too much for granted. But I really supposed you knew that my life is bound up in yours, Louise."

"And mine in yours," she replied with a perfect candor that thrilled him. "If I did not love you dearly—and I do—perhaps I should not so keenly feel that I would be doing you an injustice to marry you."

Blythe could scarcely credit his ears. Her first words had set him to soaring, but, when she had finished, he was conscious of as stunned a feeling as if he had received a physical blow. Involuntarily he stood stock still and faced her; but the need to keep moving in order not to block the progress of the other deck pedestrians quickly flashed upon him. When he moved forward again at her side, however, listening to her quiet, earnest words, he was conscious, for a while, of a certain numbness, almost approaching languor, which he found it difficult to throw off.

Louise, more reservedly but with no lack of clearness, touched upon the points which she had made in going over the same ground with Laura. Surprised as he was, Blythe, whose mind had never been visited by any of the considerations which she named, nevertheless had an immediate and acute understanding of the ordeal through which the girl must be passing in thus presenting her analysis of the situation to him.

"It would be the logical thing for me to say that you have wholly misjudged me, Louise," he said to her when she had finished. "But I am not going to do that, because I know that you have done nothing of the sort. You are simply the victim of a perfectly natural supersensitiveness. I know how difficult you have found it to say such things. I blame myself for having pressed you to the point where you considered it necessary to say them. It is scarcely less hard for me to talk of such a matter—harder still because nothing that you have touched upon has even once occurred to me. I know that you are the woman my heart craves for. Nothing that you have said, or ever can say, will change that. And if you care for me—"

"I do," Louise interrupted him. "You are never out of my thoughts. I find it hard to believe that there ever was a time when I did not know you and love you."

The beautiful spontaneity and frankness of the avowal sent the blood pounding at Blythe's temples.

"Then do you suppose, Louise," he said to her, in a vibrant voice of enthrallment, "that anything in this world of God can ever keep us apart? Everything gives way—must give way—to the love of a man for a woman, of a woman for a man. You speak of my ambition, my career. What would they be worth to me without you? Vain things—things that I would thrust away from me! I tell you it has come to pass that my life is inseparably bound up in yours. All the rest would be a futile striving without you. The great miracle of life has come upon me. There was a time when I feared that it would pass me by. You are the woman of all my dreams—the dreams of boy and man. How can anything stand between us?"

"I have thought that, too, often," said Louise, no less moved by his fervor than he had been by her avowal. "But the thought that I might be the means of throwing a shadow upon your path—"

"Shadow!" broke out Blythe. "There would be no path for me without you!"

"But, dear," said Louise, conscious that her ground was giving way beneath her, "we cannot always do that which we want to do, can we? We owe each other unselfishness at least, if only on account of our love? And if you were to be swept by a regret in the time that is to come, how—"

"Don't say that, Louise," said Blythe. "It is too impossible. It is too inconceivable."

They came to a pause in their stroll and stood, hands on rail, gazing over the billowing expanse of sun-sparkling sea.

"You will give me time to think it all out, dear, won't you?" said Louise. "My experience has been so small that I do not often presume to feel very sure of my ground."

"When you speak of how small your experience has been, Louise," said Blythe, a symptom of a smile flickering around his eyes, "I am revisited by a kind of self-condemnation that I have known ever since I became aware that I loved you. Even now I wonder if I am really guilty of having pounced upon you, when you were barely out of school, and before you had your rightful chance to enslave and then appraise your cluster of suitors—"

Louise, smiling, placed a hand upon his arm.

"Please don't continue that," she said. "All the 'clusters of suitors' in the world would have made no difference to me. Always, I think, John, I should have been gazing beyond them—if they had appeared, which of course is merely your polite assumption—to see your face. And then the poor 'enslaved' ones would have disappeared in a sudden mist, and I should have seen only you."

Hands resting upon steamer rails may be furtively pressed, no matter how many deck strollers there may be.

"How royally you grant absolution!" said Blythe. "But, for all that, it is not as a sister confessor alone that I need you. If now you have made the path so clear for me, then it is your own fault, heart of dreams. It is as wife, mate of me, that I need you—and shall have you."

Wife and mate of the man beloved! They were new words—even expressing a new thought—to Louise, and they sang tumultuously in her heart.

Mrs. Treharne, very white and with the spiritual delicacy of an illness already far-advanced upon her features, was propped up in bed, gazing with a sort of vacant wonderment at her almost transparent hands, which she held up to the light, when the faithful Heloise entered the room with Louise's wireless message from the Mauretania. She read it eagerly and then suffered the message to flutter from her fingers to the coverlet.

"My little girl will be here day after tomorrow morning," she said to the maid, smiling wanly with the happiness of it. "Do you think she will know her mother, Heloise?"

"Know you, madame?" said the maid, half grumblingly, half soothingly, as she raised her mistress and patted the pillows. "Madame must not be morbid. The doctor said that. I, too, say it. Why should not Mademoiselle Louise know her mother?"

"Because, good Heloise, her mother is a spectre, a wraith, a lingering ghost," said Mrs. Treharne, taking the maid's hand in both her own and patting it; whereupon Heloise promptly produced a handkerchief from the pocket of her tiny apron with her free hand and began to dab at her eyes. The mistress studied the maid with surprise. "Why, Heloise, I did not know you cared so much," she said. "But I have noticed that you do not scold me any more. That is because you do care, then, Heloise?"

"Madame does not need to be scolded any more," said Heloise, brokenly. "Before, one was obliged to scold her; that is, one thought so." The girl turned away her face and gazed blankly out of the window at the swaying trees. "But now, madame, one is sorry ever to have scolded at all."

They occupied a pretty hotel cottage on the outskirts of the bright little town of Saranac in the Adirondacks. It is a town transiently inhabited mainly by victims of pulmonary affections. But Mrs. Treharne's illness was not of that character. She had been obliged to take to bed a few days after reaching Saranac. Her medical men had told her that she was suffering from a gradual disintegration of the vital forces.

"I quite understood that before I came here," Mrs. Treharne had said to them. "You express in terms of politeness a fact that I have been perfectly familiar with for a long time: that I am simply worn out. There are reasons, aside from any consideration of myself, why I should like to have you gentlemen inform me as to one point at once."

"And that is?" the physicians had asked her.

"Am I to get well, or am I to die?" Mrs. Treharne had asked them out of hand.

Very naturally the medical men had paused under the impact of so unusually direct a question. Then they had begun to tell her that her case presented certain complications of a somewhat grave character, and that—

"I understand," Mrs. Treharne had interrupted, smiling up at them with a bravery which the physicians later commented upon glowingly. But they had not sought to disabuse her of the inference which their halting words and manner had caused her to derive.

Mrs. Treharne had turned the matter over in her mind for days before cabling to Louise. Before sending that message she had, in her perplexity, turned to her maid for advice.

"Heloise," she had said to the devoted French girl, "tell me something, won't you? The doctors have given me to understand that—oh, well, that I am not to be here very long. Do you think it would be well for me to send for my daughter?"

Heloise, thus hearing of the physicians' pronouncement for the first time, had given way to a torrent of tears; but, upon becoming calm under her mistress's cheerful words, she had replied that it would be an everlasting pity if Louise were not sent for in any case.

"I am not so sure about that," Mrs. Treharne had replied. "I recall very easily how I myself, when I was of Louise's age, recoiled from the thought of death—though I do not at all now, oddly enough. I should have hated to be at the bedside of my mother when she died—I was only a child in arms and did not know anything about it. Louise, I think, must feel the same way. Why should she not? She is my daughter. Would it not be quite as well for her to return to this country and find me gone, as it would be to send for her now and subject her to the distress of seeing me pass? I am not considering myself, Heloise. Every minute I am longing to see her. But I want to be fair now, at least, and do what is best."

Heloise had found no difficulty at all in withstanding this sort of reasoning.

"If madame does not send for her daughter," Heloise had replied, "I myself shall do so, in my own name."

"Very well," Mrs. Treharne had replied, "I shall cable her at once, and God speed her over the sea to me!"

On the second morning—sunny and beautiful—after Mrs. Treharne had received Louise's wireless message, she and Heloise heard the grinding of carriage wheels on the short gravel road leading to the cottage porch. The doctor already had paid his visit and departed, so they knew that the sound was not that of his buggy. Heloise raced on tiptoes to the window and looked down. Then she turned a delighted face upon her mistress, whose hair she had been arranging with unusual care in expectation of Louise.

"It is mademoiselle!" cried the maid.

There was a sound of hurried tripping up the stairs; and Louise, flushed from the drive, regally beautiful, swept softly into the room and, kneeling by the bed, took her mother in her arms and held her tight, rocking back and forth on the pillows, and restraining her tears by sheer effort of will. Laura found an excuse to remain on the porch for a moment, giving directions to the driver of the carriage, while mother and daughter met.

Louise had schooled herself to withstand the shock of finding her mother looking badly. But her first glance at the white-faced invalid had caused her heart to beat with agonized trepidation. It would have been obvious to an uninterested stranger that Mrs. Treharne was fast approaching the end of her days. Louise perceived it at a glance. But she would not yield to her almost overwhelming woman's impulse to weep. Her mother's penetrating mind quickly sensed the girl's struggle and the victory; and she raised Louise's head from where it nestled on her shoulder and held her face in her hands and looked at her with a smile.

"It is fine of you not to cry, dear," she said, stroking the girl's face. "It means a good deal to me to know that my daughter is a thoroughbred—and you are always that, sweetheart. And how superb you have become! What a commotion you and Laura must have made in London! Where is Laura—she is with you, of course?"

"Here I am, Tony dear, as unlosable as the proverbial bad penny," said Laura, entering the room just then and bending over from the other side of the bed and taking her old friend in her arms. "Isn't Louise looking superb? I can say it before her, because the child hasn't a groat's worth of vanity. And she has behaved extraordinarily well. I haven't had to tie her to the bedpost once."

"You are looking dazzling yourself, Laura," said Mrs. Treharne with a little sigh. "Did you know that I always was just a little jealous of you, dear?" and she laughed more merrily than she had for a long time. "Not that I ever had any reason to be, for it was the design of Providence that you should outshine me. You and Louise are to spend hours with me, are you not, telling me of your conquests in Europe? And where is John Blythe?" turning to Louise. "Is he not with you? I judged from your wireless message that—"

"Oh, yes, he returned with us on the steamer, but he remained in New York, mother," Louise put in, a quick flush overspreading her features. "Did you wish to see him? I know he would come if I were to—"

Mrs. Treharne glanced, smiling, at Laura, who returned the smile.

"Would he, dear?" asked Mrs. Treharne. "I haven't the least doubt of it. But there will be time. Later I should like to see him. He has a compelling way." She paused, then added with a smile at Louise: "But he is very lucky, all the same."

Louise, marveling at her mother's penetration in discerning, with so little to go upon, the bond between Blythe and herself, nevertheless was glad that the relationship had thus been read; for there still remained enough of her habitual shyness with her mother to have caused her to shrink slightly from making even so natural and simple a revelation.

Laura left the room presently to attend to the disposal of the arriving baggage, and Louise, removing her hat and travelling wrap, arranged her mother's pillows and then sat beside her on the bed.

"I do not ask you, you see, dear, to try to conceal the fact that you find me so greatly altered," said her mother, holding the girl's hand. "I am ashamed to recall how petulant it used to make me when you seemed to be tracing, with your big, wide eyes, my new wrinkles—which you were not doing at all; I know that now, dear heart."

"When does your doctor come today, mother?" asked Louise, a little haltingly.

"He has been here and gone," replied her mother, discerning what was in Louise's mind. "But there is no need for you to see him privately, daughter. Your little mother will tell you, for you have shown how brave you can be. I am quite as ill as you suppose me to be, Louise, and entirely beyond the help of medical men. Cry, dear, if you feel like it; I shall not mind; and there are times when tears do help one."

Louise, yielding at last, knelt beside the bed and buried her face on her mother's shoulder in an agony of quiet weeping, while her mother stroked her hair and murmured phrases of endearment that had not visited her lips since Louise had been a child.

"Take heart, girl of mine," she said after a while, when she observed that Louise's sobs were gradually abating. "I am resigned. It was to be—but I shall not distract you with phrases of that kind, which, after all, are not so consoling as they are supposed to be. I am glad that I have lived to know and to understand and to appreciate so fine and sweet a daughter as I have. And, Louise: listen."

"Yes, mother: I am listening."

"It is a gift of God, I know, that I have a daughter who, when my very soul was in peril, regenerated, recreated me. You have done that for me. I confess it without shame. My little girl summoned me, raised me from the depths. Thank God I answered the summons before I knew that my life was slipping away from me, so that I am at least open to no charge of hypocrisy or of repenting in mere grovelling fear of the judgment. My little Louise, grown to sweet, serene, pure womanhood, did this thing for me. It is something to have brought your mother to the foot of the Cross, my dear; and that knowledge, I know, will ennoble and exalt you during all the years that are to come."

When Heloise entered the room, hours later, she found her mistress asleep, and Louise's head still pillowed upon her mother's breast.