The Inglenook
of her hair, the soft red of her lips, the curve and bend of her graceful young body struck even her mother anew, though she was used to her daughter's beauty. "She is growing!" thought Mrs. Carey wistfully. "I see it all at once, and soon others will be seeing it!"
Alas! young Ralph Thurston had seen it for weeks past! He was not perhaps so much in love with Nancy the girl, as he was with Nancy the potential woman. Some of the glamour that surrounded the mother had fallen upon the daughter. One felt the influences that had rained upon Nancy ever since she had come into the world, One could not look at her, nor talk with her, without feeling that her mother—like a vine in the blood, as the old proverb says—was breathing, growing, budding, blossoming in her day by day.
The young teacher came back to the fireplace, where Mother Carey was standing in a momentary brown study.
"I've never had you alone before," he stammered, "and now is my chance to tell you what you've been to me ever since I came to Beulah."
"You have helped me in my problems more than I can possibly have aided you," Mrs. Carey replied quietly. "Gilbert was so rebellious about country schools, so patronizing, so scornful of
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