Kitabı oku: «The Inner Flame», sayfa 4

CHAPTER V
ELIZA'S INVITATION

For the first time since she had been left alone, Eliza drank her tea that night without tears; and no lump in her throat prevented her swallowing the egg she had boiled.

She held Mrs. Ballard's watch in her hand a minute before getting into bed; and looked long at its gold face, and listened to its loud and busy ticking.

"Forgive me, Mrs. Ballard," she thought; and association added, "as we forgive our debtors!"

"No, I can't!" she muttered fiercely. "I can't! What's the use o' pretendin'!"

Muffling the watch in its slipper, she turned out the gas and got into bed. Composing herself to sleep more peacefully than she had been able to do for many a night, her last thought was of Mrs. Ballard's heir; and a sense of comfort stole over her in the very fact of his existence. Again she seemed to feel the sympathetic pressure of his kind hand.

"He thinks she may be paintin' still," she reflected. "She's got colors to work with that's most blindin', they're so gorgeous, if we can judge anything by the sunsets at the island. Why not think so! It's just as reasonable as playin' harps, for all I can see."

Ever since her dear one's passing, Eliza had felt too crushed and too wicked to pray; and being unable to say the whole of her Lord's Prayer, her New England conscience would not allow her to say any of it; but to-night a sense of hope and gratitude lightened the darkness, and a new gentleness crept over her countenance as it relaxed its lines in slumber.

She wakened next morning without the load of despair on her heart; and slowly realized what had changed her outlook. She even smiled at the cat, who had leaped up on the foot of her bed. He understood that he might come no nearer.

"Every single mornin', Pluto, I've been dreadin' that the day had come I'd got to show her pictures to him. Well, that's over."

"Meow!" remarked Pluto, commenting on the selfishness of beings who overslept.

"Yes, I know what you want." Eliza turned her head wearily on the pillow. "'Weak as a cat'! I don't think much o' that expression. I notice you're strong enough to get everything you want. Oh, dear, I wonder if I'll ever feel like myself again!"

The cat jumped to the floor, and coming to the head of the bed sat down and regarded the haggard face reproachfully.

"You're just as handsome as a picture, Pluto," mused Eliza aloud. "I don't know as it's ever made you any worse 'n common cats."

This optimistic change of heart lightened the atmosphere of the cheerless kitchen that morning; and Eliza drew up the shade, which let the sun slant in past a neighboring roof for a short half-hour.

A beam struck the kittens frisking above the kitchen table, and they seemed to spring from the shadowy gloom of their corner, flinging their little paws about with the infantine glee which had first captivated their owner.

"Oh, yes, you can dance, still," she murmured, addressing them reproachfully; but she left the shade up.

It was nearly noon when her doorbell rang again. Eliza hastened to the glass. She had on her black alpaca to-day. Sweeping-cap and apron were remanded to their corner, and she made certain that her hair was smooth, then went to the speaking-tube.

"Yes?" she said, and listened for the possible voice of yesterday; but a woman's tones put the question: —

"Is this Mrs. Ballard's apartment?"

"Yes," replied Eliza briefly.

"Is this Eliza Brewster?" again asked the sweet voice.

"It is," came the non-committal admission.

"May I come up, Eliza? It's Mrs. Wright."

"Mrs. who?"

"Mrs. Wright. Don't you remember my spending the day with Mrs. Ballard last spring, just before I went to Brewster's Island?"

"Oh, Mrs. Wright!" exclaimed Eliza in a different tone. "Excuse me for keepin' you waitin'. Come right up."

Well Eliza recalled the enjoyment of her dear one in that visit of an old friend, rarely seen. Mrs. Ballard's social pleasures were so few, this day gleamed as a bright spot in memory; and, not content with opening wide the door, Eliza went out to the head of the stairs to receive the mounting figure.

"She stood here the last time," she said brokenly, as the visitor reached her and held out both hands to receive Eliza's.

The newcomer's silver-white hair made an aureole about the face that looked with kindly eyes into the other's dim ones.

"I was just thinking of that as I saw you waiting," she said. "It was a shock to me to learn that Mrs. Ballard had left us. Was it very sudden, Eliza?"

The latter could not trust herself to speak. She nodded and ushered Mrs. Wright into the living-room, where they both sat down, the visitor's heart touched by the mourner's altered countenance, and the evident struggle she was making not to give way. Her compassion showed in her gentle face and Eliza made a brave effort to smile.

"I know I'm a sight, Mrs. Wright," she faltered. "I've never been any hand to cry, but I've nearly washed the eyes out o' my head the past week. I don't expect anybody to know what I've lost." Her lips twitched and she bit them hard.

"I can very well imagine," returned the other, "for Mrs. Ballard spoke so warmly of you to me, and told me how many years your fortunes had been cast together. She said you were the mainspring of the house."

"Thank you, Mrs. Wright," said Eliza humbly. "Yes, I saw that she ate and slept right. Her interests were where I couldn't follow 'cause I didn't know enough; but she was the mainspring o' my life. It's broken, broken. I haven't got the energy to lift a finger, nor a thing to live for. Honestly, Mrs. Wright," added Eliza in a burst of despair, "if 't wa'n't for the commonness of a Brewster bein' found so disrespectable as dead in a New York flat, and strange folks layin' their hands on me, I wouldn't 'a' lived through some o' the nights I've had since she went away. I'd lay there and try to think o' one single person it'd make any difference to, and there ain't one."

"My dear," returned Mrs. Wright, regarding the haggard face, "how about your relatives on the island?"

Eliza shook her head. "The only folks o' mine that are left are '-in-laws,' or else cousins I've scarcely heard from for twenty-five years. They haven't troubled themselves about me, and if I'd 'a' walked out that way, they'd only 'a' said I'd ought to be ashamed o' myself."

"And so you ought," said Mrs. Wright with her gentle smile.

"Well, I didn't anyway," said Eliza wearily. "Did you stay at the island all summer?"

"Yes, and I'm still there. May I take off my coat, Eliza?"

The hostess started up with sudden recollection.

"I hope you'll excuse me, Mrs. Wright; if I ever had any manners they're gone."

Slipping off the coat, and relinquishing it into Eliza's hands, the visitor went on talking. "My husband gave up business a couple of years ago. Perhaps Mrs. Ballard has told you that he was never a successful business man." Mrs. Wright stifled a sigh under a bright smile. "Nobody can be well and idle long, you know, so the next thing he began to be ailing, the dear man, and he thought the sea would do him good; and, my dear Eliza, it has done him so much good that we have become islanders."

"You don't mean you're going to stay there?"

The visitor nodded the silvery aureole of her hair.

"That is what I mean. Mr. Wright went fishing all summer and he thinks he has found his niche in life. He has not been so well and happy in years."

"You'll stay all winter?" asked Eliza incredulously.

"Yes," the visitor smiled again, "and all the winters, so far as I know. Mr. Wright is perfectly content."

"How about you?" asked Eliza briefly. She had gone back to her chair and frowned unconsciously into the peaceful face regarding her.

"Oh!" Mrs. Wright raised her eyebrows and gave her head a slight shake. "'In my father's house are many mansions!' I like to feel that it is all His house, even now, and that wherever I may live He is there, so why should I be lonely?"

Listening to these words, it seemed to Eliza as if some lamp, kept burning on the altar of this woman's soul, sent its steady light into the peaceful eyes regarding her.

"It's a good thing you can get comfort that way," she responded, rather awkwardly. "I know it must 'a' been a struggle to consent to it – any one used to a big city like Boston. What does your niece say to it?"

"Violet was with me a while. I am visiting her here now."

"She teaches, don't she? – the languages, or something?" inquired Eliza vaguely.

"No, gymnastic dancing and other branches of physical culture. She works hard, and no place ever rested her like the island, she thought. Do you remember Jane Foster?"

The corners of Eliza's mouth drew down in a smiling grimace of recollection.

"Do I remember Jennie Foster!" she said. "We grew up together."

"Well, she keeps a boarding-house in Portland now in winters and comes to the old home, summers. We boarded with her, and now, instead of closing up the place, she has rented it to me."

Eliza shook her head. "Pretty high up," she commented. "Some o' those February gales will pretty near shave you off the hill."

"A good many husky generations have been brought up and gone forth into the world out of that house," said Mrs. Wright cheerfully. "There are some trees, you know. Do you remember the apple orchard?"

"Huh!" commented Eliza. "I know how the scrawny little things look when they're bare! A lot o' shelter they'll be."

Mrs. Wright dropped her head a little to one side and her kind grey eyes rested on Eliza's grief-scarred face. "I'm glad I came to see you," she said irrelevantly.

"I'm a kind of a Job's comforter, I'm afraid. When I've thought of anything the past fortnight I've thought about Brewster's Island, – a sort of a counter-irritant, I guess."

"No, no, we can't have that. You mustn't call the Blessed Isle by such a name."

"Perhaps it won't be such a Blessed Isle after you've spent a winter there," remarked Eliza drily.

Mrs. Wright smiled. "I know it was your native place, and I hoped you might have pleasant associations with it."

Eliza sighed wearily. "Yes, if I could be twelve years old again, and go coastin' and skatin', and when it was dark tumble into bed under the eaves with a hot bag o' sand to keep the sheets from freezin' me, I should like it, I s'pose. I used to; but nobody on that snow-covered hill cares whether I'm alive or dead, and that cruel black ocean that swallowed up my father one night, and killed my mother, that roarin' around the island in the freezin' gale is the only thing I can see and hear when I think of the winter."

"Then you have been thinking of going back to the island?"

"Well, it's either that or goin' into somebody's kitchen, here." Eliza's mouth twitched grimly. "Mrs. Fabian offered me a recommendation."

"Oh, yes. The Fabians were very kind to Violet this summer."

"You don't say so! I'm glad they can be kind to somebody."

The bitterness of Eliza's tone impressed her visitor. "Mrs. Ballard was Mrs. Fabian's aunt, I believe," she ventured.

"I believe so, too," said Eliza, "but nothing she ever did proved it."

Mrs. Wright veered away from dangerous ground. "I have been thinking of you a great deal since I learned of Mrs. Ballard's going, and I wanted at least to see you before I went back." There was a little pause, then she added: "It occurred to me that you might be going home to the island – "

"I haven't any home there," interrupted Eliza stoically.

" – and I was going to ask you, in that case, if you wouldn't eat your Thanksgiving dinner with me."

Eliza looked at her visitor, startled.

"Think of me," she said slowly, "eatin' a Thanksgivin' dinner – anywhere."

Mrs. Wright felt a pang at her heart under the desolation of the voice. It seemed the voice of the forlorn room in which they sat. She rose to hide the look in her eyes, and moving to the mantel took up the sketches that stood there.

"Are these interesting things Mrs. Ballard's work?" she asked.

Eliza was clutching the meagre arms of her chair until her knuckles whitened. How fate was softening toward her! The thought that this friend of her lost one would have her own hearth on the dreaded island warmed the winter prospect. A link with Mrs. Ballard. A friend with whom she might talk of her. The rift made yesterday in her submerging clouds widened.

"Mrs. Wright," she said, unheeding the visitor's question, "you're religious, I know, 'cause you quoted the Bible, and 'cause you take cheerfully bein' buried in a snowdrift on Brewster's Island instead of havin' the things you're accustomed to. So I want you to know before you invite me to have Thanksgivin' dinner with you that I'm the wickedest woman in New York. I haven't said a prayer since Mrs. Ballard died. I hate Mrs. Fabian for her neglect of her, and I did hate the young man Mrs. Ballard left her little bit o' money to."

Mrs. Wright, holding the sketch of Mary Sidney, turned and looked at the speaker.

"Hated him 'cause he was an artist, and I didn't believe he'd appreciate her work, but just spend her savings careless. That's his mother you've got in your hand, and that's him, layin' on the mantelpiece torn across the middle."

Eliza's aspect as she talked was wild. Mrs. Wright picked up the torn pieces and fitted them together. In fancy she saw Eliza rending the card. She felt that she understood all; the heart-break, the starvation fare of tea, tears, and misery, and the blank future.

"His name's Philip Sidney, and his mother was Mrs. Ballard's niece and namesake. Yesterday he came. He was altogether different from what I expected. He took a load off o' my mind and heart. I don't begrudge him anything."

"You're sorry, then, that you tore this handsome picture."

"Oh, I didn't – 'cause Mrs. Ballard set such store by it. I only turned it to the wall. 'Twas he tore it. He said it was too pretty or something. He does look different. The picture's kind o' dreamin' lookin' and he's so awake he – well, he sparkles."

Mrs. Wright smiled at the haggard speaker.

"I'm so glad you like him. Has he come to New York to study?"

"Yes; he had to be a mining engineer when he wanted to paint. So now he's goin' to study with Mrs. Ballard's money."

"Why – I remember," said Mrs. Wright, thoughtfully regarding the sketches. "Mrs. Ballard told me about him in the spring." She looked up again at her hostess. "You've been through a great deal, Eliza," she said, "and you've tried to go alone."

"I had to go alone," returned Eliza fiercely; "but I can be honest if I am lonely and I won't sit down at your table without your knowin' that I'm a sinner. Don't talk religion to me either," she added, "'cause I ain't the kind it would do any good to."

Mrs. Wright came back to her chair and her eyes were thoughtful.

"I have a better idea still," she said. "For how long have you this apartment?"

"One week more."

"Oh, only a week. Then, supposing you come and live with me this winter."

Eliza leaned back in her chair, speechless. The grey wall of the future slowly dissolved. The possibility of friendship – of a home – was actually unnerving in its contrast to all she had steeled herself to endure.

"Come and help me, Eliza," went on the gentle voice. "Show me how to meet an island winter. I believe between us we can make a cosy sort of season of it."

"Cosy!" echoed Eliza's dry lips.

"Yes. There by the gnarled little apple trees, handicapped by winter winds, and the forlorn little chicken-house that stands near the orchard. Do you remember that?"

"Yes," answered Eliza mechanically. "'T wa'n't always a chicken-house. Polly Ann Foster built it 'cause she quarrelled with her son and wouldn't live with him. I was a little girl and we were all scared of her. When she died they began using it for the hens."

"Well, it's empty and forlorn now. Miss Foster can't keep chickens and go back to Portland every fall. That's our only near neighbor, you remember."

"I remember. Why should you be such an angel to me?" burst forth Eliza.

"Is that being an angel? Why, I'm so glad. You know I might be a little bit lonely at the island. Mr. Wright is pretty sleepy in the evening and the house rambles. We'll shut up part of it, Eliza, won't we?"

"Oh, Mrs. Wright!" exclaimed the lonely woman, every trace of her fierceness gone. "What a godsend you're givin' me."

"Then it's settled; and Violet will be so glad. She isn't quite pleased with our plan for the winter."

CHAPTER VI
BROTHER AND SISTER

Kathleen Fabian sat at her desk, deeply engrossed in the theme she was writing, when her brother's name was brought to her.

The expression of her face as she took the card did not indicate that the surprise was wholly joyous. She frowned and bit her lip, and an anxious look grew in her eyes as she went out into the hall to meet the visitor, who advanced with bounds, and grasped her in one arm, giving her cheek a brotherly peck.

"What has happened, Edgar?" she asked as he led her back into her room.

"I've come to see you, that's all," was the rejoinder.

Edgar Fabian was an airy youth, carefully arrayed in the height of fashion. His fair hair was brushed until it reflected the light, and his jaunty assurance was wont to carry all before it.

"Is anything wrong at home?" insisted his sister.

"Certainly not."

They were now inside the room and the young man closed the door.

"Well, I haven't any money," said Kathleen bluntly, – "at least, not for you!"

Edgar was but little taller than she, and, as she looked at him now, her serious slender face opposed to his boyish one, her peculiar slow speech, in which her teeth scarcely closed, sounding lazy beside his crispness, she seemed the elder of the two.

"This leaping at conclusions is too feminine a weakness for you to indulge in, Kath," was the rejoinder as the visitor slid out of a silk-lined overcoat; but he rested his gaze upon his sister's dark hair rather than the eyes beneath. "I like your hospitality," he added. "I hope it isn't presumption for me to remove my coat. Try to control your joy when your brother comes up from New York to see you."

"Of course I should always be glad to see you if – if you'd let me," was the reply.

"What's to prevent?" inquired the visitor cheerfully.

"My diary," was the laconic response.

"Oh, you make me tired," said Edgar, taking out a cigarette-case. "May I?"

"No," returned Kathleen, speaking with her characteristic deliberation.

"You may have one, too"; he offered his case, still standing, since she did not sit. He smiled as he said it; the evenness of his teeth and the glee of his smile had melted much ice before now.

"No, thanks," she answered coldly.

He gave an exclamation.

"Oh, your grave and reverend senior airs won't go down with me, you know." He sniffed suspiciously. "Some one has been having a whiff here this morning."

"It wasn't I."

"Well, it was somebody; and some one more critical than I is liable to drop in here and notice it. Just to save you trouble, I'll light up. Better take one. It's your golden opportunity."

Again he offered the case, and now Kathleen took a cigarette mechanically. She still questioned her brother's debonair countenance.

"Well," he said impatiently, after a moment of silence, "are we going to stand here until dinner-time like two tenpins?"

"Are you going to stay until dinner-time?"

"Why," with another effort at gayety, "if you go on like this and positively won't take no for an answer, perhaps I shall be obliged to. Say, Kath, what's the matter with you? You used to be a good fellow. College has ruined you. I didn't treat you like this when you came to see me."

"Forgive me, Edgar," Kathleen's drawl became very nearly an exclamation. "I was thinking so hard."

She dropped into a chair and he lighted his cigarette, and bending forward allowed her to draw the flame into her own.

"Now, this is something like it," remarked the young man, sinking upon a leather-covered divan. He picked up a guitar that lay at its head, and strummed lightly upon it. "Think of your giving house-room to anything so light-minded as a guitar!" he added, his disapproving eyes roving about the entire apartment. "This room looks more like a hermit's cell every time I come."

"No," rejoined Kathleen, with her soft laziness of speech, and blowing a ring of smoke upon the air, "it is only that you have time to forget between your visits."

Edgar removed his cigarette and began to murmur "The Owl and the Pussy Cat," in a tenor voice calculated to pour oil on troubled waters, while he struck the accompanying chords with a sure touch.

 
"They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five-pound note!"
 

he sang. "Think of it!" he groaned, pausing to save the life of his cigarette; "plenty of money! Who wouldn't be an owl or a pussy-cat!"

Kathleen's eyes narrowed.

"You speak of the rarity of my visits," he went on. "I suppose you think it is nothing to take a few hours out of a business day to run up here."

Kathleen smiled. "On the contrary, I think it so much of a thing that it always startles me to get your card on a week day, and you seem to have other uses for your Sundays."

"Very well," returned her brother, strumming the guitar with conscious rectitude; "know then that the Administration sent me up here to-day on business."

"With me?"

"No" (singing) —

'Drink to me only with thine eyes, and I will pledge – '"

"Edgar!" protested the girl lazily, "it's too early in the day for that."

"Hello, grave and reverend senior," he retorted. "I didn't know you were so much of a connoisseur."

The girl's reply had a sad note.

"I wish you would do something with that voice," she said.

The singer smiled. He was now smoking again, and strumming the melody of the song. Perhaps he was thinking that he had done a good deal with his voice.

"I don't know that it has been altogether wasted," he replied.

"Carrying off the honors as the singing-girl in a college play isn't what I mean."

"Oh, I'm sure it isn't," scoffed the possessor of the voice. "I'd take long odds that what you mean involves something that would come under the head of work spelled with a capital W – "

"Think of a man butterfly!" ejaculated Kathleen, removing her cigarette and her drawl for an unwonted verbal explosion. "Edgar, I should have been the man, and you the girl in our family."

"I should object," he rejoined calmly, all his attention apparently concentrated on the compassing of some intricate fingering of the guitar strings.

"Think of your rooms at college and this!" went on Kathleen.

"I'd like mighty well to have a squint at the loved and lost to take the taste of this out of my mouth," returned the visitor imperturbably.

"How is father?" asked Kathleen, relapsing into her usual manner.

"Smaht," rejoined Edgar.

At the reminder of Brewster's Island, Kathleen's eyes smiled, then grew grave. "I can't bear to have you call father the Administration," she said.

"Why not? – you didn't want me to call him Governor."

"It sounds so – so disrespectful."

"Not to me. I think it suggests salaams."

"No, Edgar – slams; but I don't want to joke."

"I'm sure of it," interpolated the guitar-playing one.

"Stop that noise a minute, please."

He obeyed.

"I wish you wouldn't speak of father so coldly."

"Then it'll be likely to be hotly, and at that you'd make a fuss," returned the youth doggedly.

"He is a good father," declared the girl, the lingering words coming devoutly.

"Yes," retorted Edgar drily. "Perhaps, if your little day-dream could come true and you be the son, you wouldn't think so."

"I believe it is father's fault largely," said Kathleen. "He began by spoiling you."

"Then, if I'm spoiled, what's the use of kicking? – and if he's done it he must pay for it; but that's just what he won't do – pay for it."

The speaker stubbed the light out of his cigarette and tossed it on the table. He rose and walked the floor.

"He has put you in his office," said Kathleen. "He will give you every chance to rise."

"Yes, and meanwhile pays me a salary smaller than the allowance he gave me at college."

"Because," said the girl, "he found that you couldn't even keep within that. He knew you must wake up."

"What occasion?" demanded Edgar, standing still to gesture. "I'm the only son. Look at the money he has."

"And has worked for; worked for, Edgar. Can't you understand? Supposing you had worked like that, and had a son who dipped into the bag with both hands and threw your money away."

"I don't want to throw it away. I get one hundred cents' worth of fun out of every dollar I spend. What more does he want? I didn't ask to be born, did I? I didn't ask to have expensive tastes. Why should I have to ride in a taxicab?"

"You don't. There are the street cars."

Edgar's blond face turned upon her angrily. "When do you suppose I want a machine? When I'm doddering around with a cane?"

"Earn it, then."

"Yes, I can on a petty few hundreds a year!"

"You drive down with father every morning, don't you?"

"No, I don't. I have to get there before he does."

Kathleen laughed. "What an outrage!"

"I take the car first and then it goes back for him," said Edgar sulkily.

"Oh, the cruelty of some parents!" drawled Kathleen, knocking the ash from her cigarette. "The idea of Peter going back for father. He should stand in Wall Street awaiting your orders."

"No, he shouldn't, but I should have a motor of my own. The Ad. is more old-fashioned than any of the other fathers in our set." The speaker paused and gestured defensively. "You'll get off all that ancient stuff about the new generation wanting to begin where the old left off. Of course we do. Why not? I hope my son will begin where I leave off."

Kathleen gave her one-sided smile – her Mona Lisa smile her admirers called it: —

"Where you leave off is not liable to be a bed of roses if you keep on as you've begun." She looked up at her brother gravely as she tapped the end of her cigarette and dropped it in the ash receiver. "Why don't you use your brains?" she asked. "Can't you see that the more father notices that you have no ambition, the tighter he will draw the rein?"

"I have plenty of ambition."

"For work?"

"Oh, you make me tired!"

The young man resumed his impatient walk.

The sister leaned back in her chair, her dark eyes following him, without the hint of a smile.

"I'd like to see you tired," she said seriously.

He turned on her. "Ever see me after a polo game?"

"But life isn't a game, Edgar."

He opened his eyes at her and grimaced scornfully.

"The grave and reverend senior again; nearly ready to graduate, and inform the world that

 
'Life is real, life is earnest,
And the grave is not its goal!'
 

Might as well be in the grave at once as dig and grind the days away. Heaven help us when you get home! I suppose you must go through the fine-spun theory stage like the usual attack of measles."

"Measles are catching," remarked Kathleen quietly.

"Exactly! but I'm mighty glad I'm immune from the know-it-all disease."

"That would mean that you'd had it, Edgar, and you never did have it; not even a rash. Open the window, please. We're a little blue in here."

Edgar threw open the unoffending window with a force that threatened the mechanism.

"No doubt," he said, "you'd like to have me live, like that cowboy, in a stable, and get my own meals."

"A garage would suit you better, I suppose," returned Kathleen. "What are you talking about?"

"Hasn't mother written you of the genius who has come out of the wild and woolly to get his Pegasus curried in New York?"

"Has mother taken up a genius? – Mother, of all people!"

"Why, she's had him at the house, and insists on my being civil to him; but I haven't seen him yet. I get enough of him right at the breakfast and dinner table without hunting up the stable. His ambition is at the bottom of my coffee cup, and his genius for hard work is served as an entrée every night."

"Oh," – Kathleen's face gained a ray of interest, – "you mean that cousin of ours."

"He's no cousin," retorted Edgar. "He's one of mother's fifty-seven varieties, a sort of step-neighbor-in-law of ours. When father and mother were out at the mine they met him. I think it was up to him to stay out there and make that mine pay. I think if he'd shown a little genius for hard work right there, it would have been more to the point."

"Yes, mother wrote me." Kathleen's tone was tinged with the interest in her eyes. "What is his name, now?"

"Sidney," responded Edgar with open disgust. "Oh, I'm authority on his name all right, – Philip Sidney; I've had it dinged into my ears faithfully."

"A name to live up to," remarked the girl. "It was interesting, Aunt Mary leaving him her money."

"It would have been more interesting if she'd had anything to leave."

Edgar had thrown himself back on the divan and was watching curtains and smoke draw out the window.

"Do you remember," continued his sister, "what nice cookies Aunt Mary used to give us when we were little? Mother felt sorry not to be here when she died."

"Oh, mother's ripping," declared Edgar, his cheerfulness restored by some inspiriting memory. "She's had a hand-to-hand, knock-down-and-drag-out with the old gargoyle that holds the fort over there at Aunt Mary's."

"What do you mean?" drawled Kathleen with faint disgust.

"Mother gave a graphic account of the fray at dinner one night. I wasn't giving the story my whole attention, but I gathered that she and the doughty Eliza each got hold of one end of Aunt Mary's camel's hair shawl and had a tug of war; and Eliza's cat won the day for her by jumping on mother and nearly clawing her furs off."

"Edgar," protested Kathleen, "your bump of respect is an intaglio!"

"Well, I think I've got it about right. There were diamonds mixed up in it too. I believe Eliza wears a diamond tiara at her work so as to keep it away from mother; while the parent of the worshipful Philip came in for a diamond necklace, and mother was left nothing but cold neglect."

"Absurd!" breathed Kathleen. "Aunt Mary was poor as a church mouse."

"Well, whatever happened, the fur was rising on the back of mother's neck, and I didn't know but there would be a silver lining to the cloud and she'd cut Philip Sidney; but," with a heavy sigh, "no such luck. The cowboy still gallops his Pegasus over my prostrate body every meal."