“I wonder when I shall see her?”

            “Write and ask her to come and spend the winter with us.”

            “What—and leave Boston, and her kindergartens, and associated charities, and symphony concerts, and debating clubs? You don’t know Aunt Mary!”

            “No, I don’t. It seems so incongruous that you should adore such a bundle of pedantries.”

            “I forgive that, because you’ve never seen her. How I wish you could!”

            He stood looking down at her with the all-promising smile of the happy lover. “Well, if she won’t come to us we’ll go to her.”

            “Laurence—and leave this!”

            “It will keep—we’ll come back to it. My dear girl, don’t beam so; you make me feel as if you hadn’t been happy until now.”

            “No—but it’s your thinking of it!”

            “I’ll do more than think; I’ll act; I’ll take you to Boston to see your Aunt Mary.”

            “Oh, Laurence, you’d hate doing it.”

            “Not doing it together.”

            She laid her hand for a moment on his. “What a difference that does make in things!” she said, as she broke the seal of the letter.

            “Well, I’ll leave you to commune with Aunt Mary. When you’ve done, come and find me in the library.”

            Delia sat down joyfully to the perusal of her letter, but as her eye travelled over the closely written pages her gratified expression turned to one of growing concern; and presently, thrusting it back into the envelope, she followed her husband to the library. It was a charming room and singularly indicative, to her fancy, of its occupant’s character; the expanse of harmonious bindings, the fruity bloom of Renaissance bronzes, and the imprisoned sunlight of two or three old pictures fitly epitomizing the delicate ramifications of her husband’s taste. But now her glance lingered less appreciatively than usual on the warm tones and fine lines which formed so expressive a background for Corbett’s fastidious figure.

            “Aunt Mary has been ill—I’m afraid she’s been seriously ill,” she announced as he rose to receive her. “She fell in coming down-stairs from one of her tenement-house inspections, and it brought on water on the knee. She’s been laid up ever since—some three or four weeks now. I’m afraid it’s rather bad at her age; and I don’t know how she will resign herself to keeping quiet.”

            “I’m very sorry,” said Corbett, sympathetically; “but water on the knee isn’t dangerous, you know.”

            “No—but the doctor says she mustn’t go out for weeks and weeks; and that will drive her mad. She’ll think the universe has come to a standstill.”

            “She’ll find it hasn’t,” suggested Corbett, with a smile which took the edge from his comment.

            “Ah, but such discoveries hurt—especially if one makes them late in life!”

            Corbett stood looking affectionately at his wife.

            “How long is it,” he asked, “since you have seen your Aunt Mary?”

            “I think it must be two years. Yes, just two years; you know I went home on business after—” She stopped; they never alluded to her first marriage.

            Corbett took her hand. “Well,” he declared, glancing rather wistfully at the Paris Bordone above the mantel-piece, “we’ll sail next month and pay her a little visit.”

              

 

 II.
 
 

            Corbett was really making an immense concession in going to America at that season; he disliked the prospect at all times, but just as his hotel in Paris had reopened its luxurious arms to him for the winter, the thought of departure was peculiarly distasteful. Delia knew it, and winced under the enormity of the sacrifice which he had imposed upon himself; but he bore the burden so lightly, and so smilingly derided her impulse to magnify the heroism of his conduct, that she gradually yielded to the undisturbed enjoyment of her anticipations. She was really very glad to be returning to Boston as Corbett’s wife; her occasional appearances there as Mrs. Benson had been so eminently unsatisfactory to herself and her relatives that she naturally desired to efface them by so triumphal a re-entry. She had passed so great a part of her own life in Europe that she viewed with a secret leniency Corbett’s indifference to his native land; but though she did not mind his not caring for his country she was intensely anxious that his country should care for him. He was a New Yorker, and entirely unknown, save by name, to her little circle of friends and relatives in Boston; but she reflected, with tranquil satisfaction, that, if he were cosmopolitan enough for Fifth Avenue, he was also cultured enough for Beacon Street. She was not so confident of his being altruistic enough for Aunt Mary; but Aunt Mary’s appreciations covered so wide a range that there seemed small doubt of his coming under the head of one of her manifold enthusiasms.

            Altogether Delia’s anticipations grew steadily rosier with the approach to Sandy Hook; and to her confident eye the Statue of Liberty, as they passed under it in the red brilliance of a winter sunrise, seemed to look down upon Corbett with her Aunt Mary’s most approving smile.

            Delia’s Aunt Mary—known from the Back Bay to the South End as Mrs. Mason Hayne—had been the chief formative influence of her niece’s youth. Delia, after the death of her parents, had even spent two years under Mrs. Hayne’s roof, in direct contact with all her apostolic ardors, her inflammatory zeal for righteousness in everything from baking-powder to municipal government; and though the girl never felt any inclination to interpret her aunt’s influence in action, it was potent in modifying her judgment of herself and others. Her parents had been incurably frivolous, Mrs. Hayne was incurably serious, and Delia, by some unconscious powers of selection, tended to frivolity of conduct, corrected by seriousness of thought. She would have shrunk from the life of unadorned activity, the unsmiling pursuit of Purposes with a capital letter, to which Mrs. Hayne’s energies were dedicated; but it lent relief to her enjoyment of the purposeless to measure her own conduct by her aunt’s utilitarian standards. This curious sympathy with aims so at variance with her own ideals would hardly have been possible to Delia had Mrs. Hayne been a narrow enthusiast without visual range beyond the blinders of her own vocation; it was the consciousness that her aunt’s perceptions included even such obvious inutility as hers which made her so tolerant of her aunt’s usefulness. All this she had tried, on the way across the Atlantic, to put vividly before Corbett; but she was conscious of a vague inability on his part to adjust his conception of Mrs. Hayne to his wife’s view of her; and Delia could only count on her aunt’s abounding personality to correct the one-sidedness of his impression.

            Mrs. Hayne lived in a wide brick house on Mount Vernon Street, which had belonged to her parents and grandparents, and from which she had never thought of moving. Thither, on the evening of their arrival in Boston, the Corbetts were driven from the Providence Station. Mrs.