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122 lamp that burned pale and strangely yellow on the bare table near the window. In the white frost on the pane it had melted watery circles, through which shone the winter dawn,—the deep, sad, mysterious blue that is neither darkness nor daylight.

"Good-morning, mother," said Marden quietly. With his hand still on the latch of the little deal door, he stood looking at her. She had just taken a lid from the stove, and through the open circle below thin tongues of flame quivered upward, showing her plainly,—this little woman in black, with gray hair and gray eyes, who stood in the flickering light and smiled at him. She looked very beautiful to him then. And she must have looked so to others once; years ago she must have been an English "hawk blonde" of the gentler type,—a type that appeared with a difference in Marden's thin, fine features and bright gray eyes.

Now, as he stood looking at her, her eyes were large and shining.

"Why, mother," he said before he thought, "you have n't been crying, have you?"