Mother cried when Mary Alice told her the Secret. "Oh, it's true! it's true!" she said. "If only everybody could know it, what a different world this would be!"
And as for the—Other! When Mary Alice told her mother about him and what his coming into her life and his going out of it had meant, Mother just held her girl close and could not speak.
The precious month flew by on wings as of the wind. Mary Alice was "the town wonder," as her brother Johnny said, and she enjoyed that as only a girl who has been the town wall-flower can; but after all, everything was as nothing compared with Mother and the exultation that had so evidently come into her life because out of her love and pain and sacrifice a soul had come into the world to draw so richly from the treasures of other hearts and to give so richly back again. There is no triumph like it, as Mary Alice would perhaps know, some day. A mother's purest happiness is very like God's own.
But at last the sailing date was close at hand. Mary Alice's heart was heavy and glad together. "If I could only take you!" she whispered to her mother.
Mother shook her head. "I wouldn't go and leave your father and the children," she said. "You go and enjoy it all for me. I like it better that way."
And so, once more Mary Alice smiled through tear-filled eyes at the dear faces on the station platform, and was gone again into the big world beyond her home. But this time what a different girl it was who went!
X
THE OLD WORLD AND THE KING
They had an unusually delightful voyage. The weather was perfection and their fellow-voyagers included many persons interesting to talk with and many others interesting to observe and speculate about.