age'," and pinching Molly's blushing cheek, she went over to join a group of recently made acquaintances who were looking at a distant sail through an overworked spyglass belonging to one of the tourists.

"What a tease Mother is! But she looks so like my brother Kent when she teases me that I don't mind. Kent is always teasing and the only reason I can stand it is that it makes him look like Mother! You see, Kent is my special beloved brother and you know what my mother is."

"Yes, I know," answered Mr. Kinsella, who had sunk into the chair vacated by Mrs. Brown. "Your mother is a rare woman: beautiful and honest and tolerant, charming and well-bred, broad-minded and cultured. Eternal youth is in her heart, but she has a character gracefully to accept the years that Providence has allotted her and that only serve to make her more lovely. I have no patience with the assumption of extreme youth in the middle-aged, despite the limerick I have taken for my motto."

"But, Mr. Kinsella, you are not middle-aged," protested Molly. "I never even think of Mother as being middle-aged. I think that is the ugliest word in our language, except, maybe, stout. I'd a great deal rather be called fat and forty than stout and middle-aged!"

"Well, it will be many a year before you will be called either, and by that time you may change your mind. 'A rose by any other name would smell as sweet,' and, after all, it is being stout and middle-aged that makes the difference, not being called it."

While Molly was having the little chat with Mr. Kinsella, Mrs. Huntington had come on deck and had approached them from behind. Looking up, Molly surprised on her face an expression of extreme bitterness, and she wondered if she had overheard Mr. Kinsella's views on the subject of the assumption of youth in the middle-aged. "I do hope she didn't," thought Molly. "She is so pretty, and it must be hard to give up youth and to feel your beauty slipping from you. Especially hard when beauty has been your chief asset in life, as I fancy it has been with Mrs. Huntington." She gave the older woman a polite bow and smile and Mr. Kinsella formally offered her his chair but with no great cordiality.

"Oh, thank you, Tom. And how are you, Miss Brown? I do hope you are feeling better. My daughter has taken such a fancy to you, she has been quite désolé at your nonappearance all day."

"Oh, I am all well again, thanks to Mr. Kinsella's getting me some food at the psychological moment when health was returning," answered Molly, wondering at Mrs. Huntington's change of tactics since the evening before, when she had been so insolent in her bearing to her. "It is certainly nicer to have her polite to me than rude, whether she means it or not," she said to herself. "I do wish I had not been sick all day. I did want to see her first meeting with Mr. Kinsella. I know she had something to do with his premature grayness and the disappointment that Pierce hinted at. How coldly polite he is to her now. If a man like that had ever loved me and then could be so cold to me, I believe it would kill me," which shows that Molly was very sentimental and on the lookout for romance.

The gong rang for dinner and there was a general move toward the cabin.

"Please tell Mother I am all right and will sit here while she is at dinner, and that she must not hurry. I believe 'discretion would be the better part of valor' for me and I had better not try to eat anything more for a while."

After the deck was clear except for a few helplessly, hopelessly sick persons who lay like mummies in their chairs, ranged along the deck, Molly decided to get up and walk around a little, feeling anxious to try her sea legs. Then as the wind had shifted, she determined to move her chair to a sheltered nook behind one of the life-boats. She bundled herself up in her rug, pulling the corner of it over her head and lay for all the world like the rest of the mummies. "Only, thank goodness, I am no longer sick," she thought gratefully.

Her soul was at peace, after the night and day of agony, and she dropped off easily into a doze. She dreamed that she was at home in the old apple tree that they had called "The Castle" and that Kent was gently shaking the tree, trying to make her get out so Professor Green could build his bungalow there; and when she refused and declared it was her Castle and she intended to stay in it, the Professor himself had come, with his kind brown eyes looking into hers, and said: "But, Miss Molly, the bungalow is yours, too, and the Orchard is still your home." She awoke but lay quite still wondering at the reality of her dream.

CHAPTER IV.

WHAT MOLLY OVERHEARD.

It had grown quite dark. The passengers were evidently still at dinner. A man loomed up close to her and then stopped, evidently unaware of her presence. Leaning over the rail and gazing into the black depths of water, he emitted a sigh that seemed to come from his soul. Suddenly a woman joined him. Molly was still half asleep, thinking of the orchard at Chatsworth and of what Professor Green's bungalow would look like among the apple trees. Her thoughts came back to the ship with a bounce when she heard the woman say:

"Tom, why do you avoid me? Can't you let bygones be bygones?"

"That is exactly what I am doing, Mrs. Huntington: letting bygones be bygones. It seems a useless thing for us to rake up the past."

"'Mrs. Huntington' sounds very cold and formal coming from your lips."

"Well, I gathered you did not think much of the name of Lizzie since you have changed your daughter's to Elise."

"Oh, Tom, you are cruel!"

"Now see here, Mrs. Huntington, I do not want to be rude to you. I have lived in total ignorance of you and your affairs for twenty-five years, and since by chance we meet on a steamer, you cannot make me feel that what I do or say is of the slightest importance to you. You made the young Tom Kinsella about as miserable as a man could be, but the old Tom is immune from misery, thank God, and there is no use in trying to get a flame from the dead ashes of the past. I am very glad to see you again and especially glad to make the acquaintance of the daughter of my old friend, George O'Brien."

"You forgive George but do not forgive me."

"I have nothing to forgive George, and you know it. He was the soul of honor and had no idea of there being an engagement between us, when he married you. I am as sure of this as though George himself had told me. In those good old days in Paris when we were all of us art students, George and I were great chums. I could read him like a book and there never lived a more honest fellow.

"When my father died and his foundry at Newark seemed in a fair way to be on its last legs for want of management and the family income was in danger of being decidedly lessened, you persuaded me, in fact, you put it up to me, to give you up or give up art and go to work and pull the foundry out of the hole.

"Art meant a lot to me, but at the time you meant a lot more. You remember you would not let me announce our engagement to our friends, not even to George.

"I went back to America and piled into a work, entirely uncongenial, but determined to win out. Things were in an awful mess because of my father's long inability to attend to business. My brother Pierce was still in college and could be of no assistance to me. I had to master the business from the beginning, learning every detail before I could put it on the efficiency basis that I knew it must attain before I could be satisfied.

"I wrote you rather discouraged letters, I will admit, but I felt I could pour out my soul to you and you alone. I knew it would be two or three years before it would be expedient for us to marry, but my faith in you was supreme and it never entered my head you would not wait for me.

"When the goal was in sight, you may imagine the shock it gave me when a casual acquaintance,