good would it do me to cry?"

After she had left him he was restless. She had been for so long a
part of his life, a very necessary and pleasant part of it. She never
touched his depths or rose to his heights. She seemed to beckon, yet
not to care when he came.

He spoke of her that night to Emily. "Hilda was here to-day and she
reminded me that people might think that my daughter is marrying Derry
Drake for his money."

"She would look at it like that."

"When Hilda talks to me"--he was rumpling his hair--"I have a feeling
that all the people in the world are unlovely--"

"There are plenty of unlovely people," said Emily, "but why should we
worry with what they think?"

She was knitting, and he found himself watching her hands. "You have
pretty hands," he told her, unexpectedly.

She held them out in front of her. "When I was a little girl my mother
told me that I had three points of beauty--my hands, my feet, and the
family nose," she smiled whimsically, "and she assured me that I would
therefore never be common-place. 'Any woman may be beautiful,' was her
theory, 'but only a woman with good blood in her veins can have hands
and feet and a nose like yours--.' I was dreadfully handicapped in the
beginning of my life by my mother's point of view. I am afraid that
even now if the dear lady looks down from Heaven and sees me working in