The Chesters closed "their own hired house" and moved to town. The Aurora remained in her stable, nor had she left it since the morning when she came wearily back from Annisquam.
His wife had noticed, but had not seemed to notice, that Chester rode no more that fall. She noted too, but did not seem to note, that he continued his visits to the injured lad after they had returned to the city.
On all the great holidays he made a point of going down—Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New-Year's Day. Mrs. Chester had wished to duplicate for the quarryman's boy the Christmas gifts of her own child (such had been her pretty fancy), but Batty was quite a lad—ten years old; and Bert, like a spoiled collie, was yet a baby, and likely to remain so for some time to come. So the mother contented herself, perforce, with less intimate remembrances. Once, when she had packed a box of miracles—toys and books, clothes and candy—she thrust it from her with a cry: "They would never touch these—if they knew! Hurlburt! Hurlburt! don't you think they ought to know?"
"Do what you think best, Mary," he said, wearily. "I have never been able to decide that question. But you are free to do so if you prefer."
He regarded her with an expression that went to her heart. She flung herself into his arms and tried to kiss it away.
Now, Mary Chester, as we have said, was a worrier, and the worrier never lets a subject go. As the winter set in, her mind closed about the matter which had troubled her, and it began to become unbearable, like a foreign substance in the flesh.
On a January afternoon—it was one of those dark days when souls cloud over—she flung on her furs, and leaving a pencilled line to her husband saying what she had done, she took the train to Gloucester, and a dreary electric-car to Annisquam.
The flowers in the front yard were knee-deep in snow, and Batty sat in the window busy with a Sorrento wood-saw of her providing. He laughed outright when he saw her, and his mother flung open the door as if she had flung open her heart.
