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Now, as it happened, Valentine Landry, driving away in a priggish state of mind, was suddenly overwhelmed by miserable remorse. Reviewing the evening, he seemed to see, for the first time, the unhappiness in the eyes of the little woman who had borne herself so bravely. In a sudden moment of illumination he realized all that she must have been feeling. Perhaps it had not been heartlessness; perhaps it had been–heart hunger.

Leaning forward, he spoke to his chauffeur. They stopped at the first drug-store, and Landry called up Cissy. Her voice from the other end answered, sharply, then broke as he gave his name.

“I thought it was the doctor,” she said. “Can you come back, please? The baby, oh, the baby is very ill!”

Five minutes later the nurse let him into the house. He followed her up the stairs and into the nursery. Cissy sat with the baby in her arms. The baby was in a blanket and Cissy was in her gray wrapper. She had donned it while the nurse held the baby in the hot bath which saved its life. Cissy’s hair was out of curl and the color was out of her cheeks. But to Valentine Landry she was beautiful.

“It was a convulsion,” she told him, simply. “I am afraid she will have another. We haven’t been able to get a doctor–will you get one for us?”

Out he went on his mission for the lady of his heart, and the lady of his heart, sitting wet and worried in the pale-gray bedroom, was saying to herself, monotonously, “It’s all over now–no man could see me like this and love me–“

Cecily and her husband and the doctor and Landry came in out of the darkness together. They went up-stairs together, then stopped on the threshold as Cissy held up a warning hand.

She continued to croon softly the lullaby which had belonged to her own babies: “Hushaby, sweet, my own–“

It was Cecily and the doctor who went in to her, and Landry, standing back in the shadows, waited. He spoke to Cissy as she came out.

“I am going so early in the morning,” he said, “will you give me just one little minute now?”

In that minute he told her that he loved her.

And Cissy, standing in the library in all the disorder of uncurled locks and gray kimono, demanded, after a rapturous pause, “But why didn’t you tell me before?”

He found it hard to explain. “I didn’t quite realize it–until I saw you there so tender and sweet, with the baby in your arms–“

“A Madonna-creature,” murmured Cissy Beale.

But he did not understand. “It isn’t because I want you to sit in a chimney-corner–it wasn’t fair of you to say that–“

Then in just one short speech Cissy Beale showed him her heart. She told of the years of devotion, always unrewarded by the affection she craved. “And here was the baby,” she finished, “to grow up–and find somebody else, and forget me–“

As he gathered her into his protecting embrace, his big laugh comforted her.

“I’m yours till the end of the world, little grandmother,” he whispered. “I shall never find any one else–and I shall never forget.”