Julia smiled, and bit a thoughtful under lip.

“This is March,” she said.  “We’ll come and see you, let me see—­in July, and everything shall be just as it was before!  Perhaps I am really getting old,” she said to herself, half laughing and half sad, when she was in her own kitchen an hour or two later.  “But, while home is not exciting, somehow I’d rather be here than philandering on the mountain in the moonlight with Richie!”

“What you smiling about, Julie?” her mother asked, from the peaceful east side of the kitchen where her chair frequently stood while Julia and Mrs. Torney were busy in that cheerful apartment.

“Just thinking it was nice to be home again, Mama!”

“I don’t hold much with visiting, myself,” said Mrs. Torney, who was becoming something of a philosopher as she went into old age.  “But you can’t get that through a young one’s skull!” she added, trimming the dangling pastry from a pie with masterly strokes of her knife.  “Either you have such a good time that your own home is spoiled for you, for dear knows how long, or else you set around wondering why on earth you ever come.  And then you’ve got to have the folks back to visit you, and wear yourself all out talking like all possessed while you cook for ’em and make their beds.  I don’t never feel clean when I’ve washed my face away from home anyway, and I like my own bed under me.  You couldn’t get me to visit anywheres now, if it was the Queen of Spain ast me!”

Julia laughed out merrily, and agreed with her aunt, glad to have left the episode with Richie behind her.  But it haunted her for many days, nevertheless, rising like a disturbing mist between her and her calm self-confidence, and shaking her contented conviction that the renunciations necessary to her peace of mind had all been made.  She found fresh reason to gird herself in circumspection and silence, and brooded, a little in discouragement, upon the incessantly recurring problems of her life.

She went to visit the cabin on Tamalpais earlier even than she had promised, however, for in June Barbara came home for a visit, bringing two splendid little boys, with whom Anna fell instantly in love, and a tiny baby in the care of a nurse.  Julia spent a good deal of her time in Sausalito during the visit, and more than once she and Barbara took the four children to Mill Valley, and spent a few days with Richie, quite as happy as the boys and Anna were in the free country life.

Five years of marriage had somewhat changed Barbara; she was thinner, and freckled rather than rosy, and she wore her thick dark hair in a fashion Julia did not very much admire.  Also she seemed to care less for dress than she once had done, even though what she wore was always the handsomest of its kind.  But she was an eagerly admiring and most devoted wife, calmly assuming that the bronzed and silent “Francis” could do no wrong, and Julia thought she had never seen a more charming and conscientious mother.