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“Escape what?” demanded Cecily, who, in the pale-gray bedroom was endeavoring to observe the doctor’s injunction to let the wailing baby stay in her bassinet, instead of walking the floor with her.

“The black-silk-and-mitt destiny,” said the depressed lady.

“What has happened?” Cecily demanded.

“Nothing has happened,” responded her weary little mother, and refused to discuss the matter further.

But to herself she was beginning to admit that she had lost Landry. An hour later she had a telephone message from him.

“I want you to go with me for a last ride together,” he said. “I leave to-morrow.”

“To-morrow!” Her voice showed her dismay.

“But why this sudden decision–“

“I have played long enough,” he said; “business calls–“

As Mrs. Beale made ready for the ride she surveyed herself wistfully in her mirror. There were shadows under her eyes, and faint little lines toward the corners of her lips–it even seemed to her that her chin sagged. She had a sudden sense of revolt. “If I were young, really young,” she thought, “he would not be going away–“

With this idea firmly fixed in her mind, she exerted herself to please him; and her little laugh made artificial music in his ears, her fixed smile wore upon his nerves, her staccato questions irritated him.

Again they had dinner together, and as she sat opposite him, gorgeous and gay in her gown of geranium red, he began to talk with her of her daughter.

“I’ve never met her. It has seemed to me that you might have let me see her–“

Cissy flushed. “She’s such a great grown-up,” she said. “Somehow when I’m with her I feel–old–“

“You will never seem old,” he said, with the nearest approach to tenderness that had softened his voice for days. “You have in you the spirit of eternal youth–“

Then he floundered on. “But a mother and a daughter–when you used to speak of her in Chicago, it seemed to me that I could see you together, and I liked the sweetness and womanliness of the thought; but I have never seen you together.”

With a sense of recklessness upon her, Cissy suddenly determined to tell him the truth. “Cecily hasn’t been going out much. You see, there’s the baby–“

He stared. “The baby–?”

“Her baby–Cecily’s–“

“Then you’re a grandmother?“

It seemed to Cissy that the whole restaurant rang with the emphasis of the words. Yet he had not spoken loudly; not a head was turned in their direction; even the waiter stood unmoved.

When she came to herself Landry was laughing softly. “When are you going to let me see–the baby–?”

“Never–“

“Why not?”

Cissy went on to her doom. “Because you’ll want to put me on the shelf like all the rest of them. You’ll want to see me with–my hair–parted–and spectacles. And my eyes are perfectly good–and my hair is my own–“

She stopped. Landry was surveying her with hard eyes.

“Don’t you love–the baby–?”

Cissy shrugged. “Perhaps. I don’t know yet. Some day I may when I haven’t anything to do but sit in a chimney-corner.”

Thus spoke Cissy Beale, making of herself a heartless creature, flinging back into the face of Valentine Landry his most cherished ideals.

But what did it matter? She had known from the moment of her confession that he would be repelled. What man could stand up in the face of the world and marry a grandmother!–the idea was preposterous.

She finished dinner with her head in the air; she was hypocritically lively during the drive home; she said “Good-night” and “Good-bye” without feeling, and went up-stairs with her heart like lead to find the nurse weeping wildly on the first landing.

The baby, it appeared, was very ill. And the baby’s father and mother, having left the little cherub sleeping peacefully, were motoring somewhere in the wide spaces of the world. The family doctor was out. She had called up another doctor, and he would come as soon as he could. But in the meantime the baby was dying–

“Nonsense, Kate,” said Cissy Beale, and pulling off her gloves as she ran, she made for the pale-gray room.