me come in, and dance about me like a little witch.  She wanted me to taste jam, or to hold Teddy, or to see her roses—­I used to feel sometimes as if all the sunshine in the world was for Rose!  Your father had boarded with my mother for three years before they were married, you know, and I was fighting the bitterest sort of heartache over the fact that I liked him and missed him—­not that he ever dreamed it!  Perhaps she did, for she was always generous with you babies—­loaned you to me, and was as sweet to me as she could be.”  Mrs. Bancroft crumpled the telegram, smiled, and sighed.  “Well, it all comes back with another baby—­all those times when we were young, and gay, and unhappy, and working together.  Bess will look back at these days sometime, with the same feeling.  There is nothing in life like youth and work, and hard times and good times, when people love each other, Rose.”

Rosemary suddenly leaned over to kiss her.  Her eyes were curiously satisfied.

“I see where the fairness comes in—­I see it now,” she said dreamily.  But even her stepmother did not catch the whisper or its meaning.

AUSTIN’S GIRL

In the blazing heat of a July afternoon, Mrs. Cyrus Austin Phelps, of Boston, arrived unexpectedly at the Yerba Buena rancho in California.  She was the only passenger to leave the train at the little sun-burned platform that served as a station, and found not even a freight agent there, of whom to ask the way to Miss Manzanita Boone’s residence.  There were a few glittering lizards whisking about on the dusty boards, and a few buzzards hanging motionless against the cloudless pale blue of the sky overhead.  Otherwise nothing living was in sight.

The train roared on down the valley, and disappeared.  Its last echo died away.  All about was the utter silence of the foot-hills.  The even spires of motionless redwood trees rose, dense and steep, to meet the sky-line with a shimmer of heat.  The sun beat down mercilessly, there was no shadow anywhere.

Mrs. Phelps, trim, middle-aged, richly and simply dressed, typical of her native city, was not a woman to be easily disconcerted, but she felt quite at a loss now.  She was already sorry that she had come at all to Yerba Buena, sorry that, in coming, she had not written Austin to meet her.  She already disliked this wide, silent, half-savage valley, and already felt out of place here.  How could she possibly imagine that there would not be shops, stables, hotels at the station?  What did other people do when they arrived here?  Mrs. Phelps crisply asked these questions of the unanswering woods and hills.