It was the very next afternoon that Mrs. Maitland found time to look after Nannie's matrimonial interests. In the raw December twilight she tramped muddily into Mrs. Richie's firelit parlor, which was fragrant with hyacinths blossoming on every window-sill. Mr. Ferguson had started them in August in his own cellar, for, as any landlord will tell you, it is the merest matter of business to do all you can for a good tenant. Mrs. Maitland found her superintendent and Mrs. Richie just shaking hands on David's luck, Mrs. Richie a little tremulous, and Robert Ferguson a little grudging, of course.

"Well, I hope they'll be happy," he said, sighing; "I suppose some marriages are happy, but—"

"Oh, Mr. Ferguson, you are delightful!" Mrs. Richie said; and it was at that moment that Mrs. Maitland came tramping in. Instantly the large, vital presence made the charming room seem small and crowded. There were too many flowers, too many ornaments, too many photographs of David. Mrs. Maitland sat down heavily on a gilded chair, that creaked so ominously that she rose and looked at it impatiently.

"Foolish sort of furniture," she said; "give me something solid, please, to sit on. Well, Mrs. Richie! How do you do?"

"Nannie has told you our great news?" Mrs. Richie inquired.

"Oh, so it's come to a head, has it?" Mrs. Maitland said, vastly pleased. "Of course I knew what was in the wind, but I didn't know it was settled. Fact is, I haven't seen her, except at breakfast, and then I was in too much of a hurry to think of it. Well, well, nothing could be better! That's what I came to see you about; I wanted to hurry things along. What do you say to it, Mr. Ferguson?"

Mrs. Maitland looked positively benign. She was sitting, a little gingerly, on the edge of the yellow damask sofa at one side of the fireplace, her feet wide apart, her skirt pulled back over her knees, so that her scorching petticoat was somewhat liberally displayed. Her big shoes began to steam in the comfortable heat of a soft-coal fire that was blazing and snapping between the brass jambs.

Mrs. Richie had drawn up a chair beside her, and Robert Ferguson stood with his elbow on the mantelpiece looking down at them. Even to Mr. Ferguson Mrs. Maitland's presence in the gently feminine room was incongruous. There was a little table at the side of the sofa, and Mrs. Maitland, thrusting out a large, gesticulating hand, swept a silver picture-frame to the floor; in the confusion of picking it up and putting it into a safer place the little emotional tension of the moment vanished. Mrs. Richie winked away a tear, and laughed, and said it was too absurd to think that their children were men and women, with their own lives and interests and hopes—and love-affairs!

"But love-making is in the air, apparently," she said; "young Knight is going to be married."

"What, Goose Molly's stepson?" Mrs. Maitland said. "She used to make sheep's-eyes at—at somebody I knew. But she didn't get him! Well, I must give the boy a present."

"And the next thing," Mrs. Richie went on, "will be Nannie's engagement. Only it will be hard to find anybody good enough for Nannie!"

"Nannie?" said Mrs. Maitland blankly. "She is to be Elizabeth's bridesmaid, of course,—unless she gets married before our wedding comes off. A young doctor has to have patients before he can have a wife, so I'm afraid the chances are Elizabeth will be Nannie's bridesmaid."

She was so full of these maternal and womanly visions that the sudden slight rigidity of Mrs. Maitland's face did not strike her.

"Nannie has been so interested," Mrs. Richie went on. "David will always be grateful to her for helping his cause. I don't know what he would have done without Nannie to confide in!"

Mrs. Maitland's face relaxed. So Nannie had not been slighted? She herself, Nannie's mother, had made a mistake; that was all. Well, she was sorry; she wished it had been Nannie. Poor 'thing, it was lonely for her, in that big, empty house! But these two people, patting themselves on the back with their personal satisfaction about their children, they must not guess her wish. There was no resentment in her mind; it was one of the chances of business. David had chosen Elizabeth,—more fool David! "for Nannie'll have—" Mrs. Maitland made some rapid calculations; "but it's not my kettle of fish," she reflected; and hoisted herself up from the low, deeply cushioned sofa.

"I hope Elizabeth will put her mind on housekeeping," she said. "A young doctor has to get all the pork he can for his shilling! He needs a saving wife."

"She'll have to be a saving wife, I'm afraid," Mrs. Richie said, with rueful pride, "for that foolish boy of mine declines, if you please, to be helped out by an allowance from me."

"Oh, he'll have more sense when he's more in love," Mrs. Maitland assured her easily. "I never knew a man yet who would refuse honest money when it was offered to him. Well, Mrs. Richie, with all this marrying going on, I suppose the next thing will be you and friend Ferguson." Even as she said it, she saw in a flash an inevitable meaning in the words, and she gave a great guffaw of laughter. "Bless you! I didn't mean that! I meant you'd be picking up a wife somewhere, Mr. Ferguson, and Mrs. Richie, here, would be finding a husband. But the other way would be easier, and a very sensible arrangement."

The two victims of her peculiar sense of humor held themselves as well as they could. Mrs. Richie reddened slightly, but looked blank. Robert Ferguson's jaw actually dropped, but he was able to say casually that of course it would be some time before the young people could be married.

"Well, give my love to Elizabeth," Mrs. Maitland said: "tell her not to jump into the river if she gets angry with David. Do you remember how she did that in one of her furies at Blair, Mr. Ferguson?" She gave a grunt of a laugh, and took herself off, pausing at the front door to call back, "Don't forget my good advice, you people!"

Robert Ferguson, putting on his hat with all possible expedition, got out of the house almost as quickly as she did. "I'd like to choke her!" he said to himself. He felt the desire to choke Mrs. Maitland several times that evening as he sat in his library pretending to read his newspaper. "She ought to be ashamed of herself! Mrs. Richie will think I have been—heaven knows what she will think!"

But the truth was, Mrs. Richie thought nothing at all; she forgot the incident entirely. It was Robert Ferguson who did the embarrassed thinking.

As for Mrs. Maitland, she went home through Mercer's mire and fog, her iron face softening into almost feminine concern. She was saying to herself that if Nannie didn't care, why, she didn't care! "But if she hankers after him"—Mrs. Maitland's face twinged with annoyance; "if she hankers after him, I'll make it up to her in some way. I'll give her a good big check!" But she must make sure about the "hankering." It would not be difficult to make sure. In these silent years together, the strong nature had drawn the weak nature to it, as a magnet draws a speck of iron. Nannie, timid to the point of awe, never daring even in her thoughts to criticize the powerful personality that dominated her daily life, nestled against it, so to speak, with perfect content. Sarah Maitland's esthetic deficiencies which separated her so tragically from her son, did not alienate Nannie. The fact that her stepmother was rich, and yet lived in a poverty-stricken locality; that the inconvenience of the old house amounted to squalor; that they were almost completely isolated from people of their own class;—none of these things disturbed Nannie. They were merely "Mamma's ways," that was all there was to say about them. She was not confidential with Mrs. Maitland, because she had nothing to confide. But if her stepmother had ever asked any personal question, she would have been incapable of not replying. Mrs. Maitland knew that, and proposed to satisfy herself as to the "hankering."

Supper was on the table when she got home, and though while bolting her food she glanced at Nannie rather keenly, she did not try to probe her feelings. "But she looks down in the mouth," Sarah Maitland thought. There must have been delicacy somewhere in the big nature, for she was careful not to speak of Elizabeth's engagement before Harris, for fear the girl might, by some involuntary tremor of lip or eyelid, betray herself.

"I'll look in on you after supper," she said.

Nannie, with a start, said, "Oh, thank you, Mamma."

When Mrs. Maitland, with her knitting and a fistful of unopened letters, came over to the parlor, she had also, tucked into her belt, a check.

It had never occurred to Nannie, in all these years and with a very liberal allowance, to mitigate her parlor. It was still a place of mirrors, grown perhaps a little dim; of chandeliers in balloons of brown paper-muslin, which, to be sure, had split here and there with age, so that a glimmer of cut glass sparkled dimly through the cracks; a place of marble-topped tables, and crimson brocade curtains dingy with age and soot; a place where still the only human thing was Nannie's drawing-board. She was bending over it now, copying with a faithful pencil a little picture of a man and a maid, and a dove and a Love. She was going to give the drawing to Elizabeth; in fact, she had begun it several days ago with joyous anticipation of this happy happening. But now, as she worked, her hand trembled. She had had a letter from Blair, and all her joyousness had fled:

"The Dean is an ass, of course; but mother'll get excited about it, I'm afraid. Do smooth her down, if you can."

No wonder Nannie's hand trembled!

Mrs. Maitland, putting her letters on the table, sat down heavily and began to knit. She glanced at Nannie over her spectacles. "Better get through with it," she said to herself. Then, aloud, "Well, Nannie, so David and Elizabeth have made a match of it?"

For a minute Nannie's face brightened. "Yes! Isn't it fine? I'm so pleased. David has been crazy about her ever since he was a boy."

Well! She was heart-whole! There was no doubt of that; Mrs. Maitland, visibly relieved, dismissed from her mind the whole foolish business of love-making. She began to read her letters, Nannie watching her furtively. When the third letter was taken up—a letter with the seal of the University in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope—Blair's sister breathed quickly. Mrs. Maitland, ripping the envelope open with a thrust of her forefinger, read it swiftly; then again, slowly. Then she said something under her breath and struck her fist on the table. Nannie's fingers whitened on her pencil. Sarah Maitland got up and stood on the hearth-rug, her back to the fire.

"I'll have to go East," she said, and began to bite her forefinger.

"Oh, Mamma," Nannie broke out, "I am sure there isn't anything really wrong. Perhaps he has been—a little foolish. Men are foolish in college. David got into hot water lots of times. But Blair hasn't done anything really bad, and—"

Mrs. Maitland gave her a somber look. "He wrote to you, did he?" she said. And Nannie realized that she had not advanced her brother's cause. Mrs. Maitland picked up her letters and began to sort them out. "When is he going to grow up?" she said. "He's twenty-four; and he's been dawdling round at college for the last two years! He's not bad; he hasn't stuff enough in him to be bad. He is just lazy and useless; and he's had every chance young man could have!"

"Mamma!" Nannie protested, "it isn't fair to speak that way of Blair, and it isn't true, not a word of it!" Nannie, the 'fraid-cat of twenty years ago,—afraid still of thunder-storms and the dark and Sarah Maitland, and what not,—Nannie, when it came to defending Blair, had all the audacious courage of love. "He is not lazy, he is not useless; he is—he is—" Nannie stammered with angry distress; "he is dear, and good, and kind, and never did any harm in his life. Never! It's perfectly dreadful, Mamma, for you to say such things about him!"

"Well, well!" said Sarah Maitland, lifting an amused eyebrow. It was as if a humming-bird had attacked a steel billet. Her face softened into pleased affection. "Well, stick up for him," she said; "I like it in you, my dear, though what you say is foolish enough. You remind me of your mother. But your brother has brains. Yes, I'll say that for him,—he's like me; he has brains. That's why I'm so out of patience with him," she ended, lapsing into moody displeasure again. "If he was a fool, I wouldn't mind his behaving like a fool. But he has brains." Then she said, briefly, "'Night," and tramped off to the dining room.

The next morning when Nannie, a little pale from a worried night, came down to breakfast, her stepmother's place was empty.

"Yes," Harris explained; "she went off at twelve, Miss Nannie. She didn't let on where. She said you'd know."

"I know," poor Nannie said, and turned paler than ever.