XXI. "OUR BELOVED BROTHER"




I

THE TEA-TABLE


Angeline's slender, wiry form and small, glossy gray head bent over the
squat brown tea-pot as she shook out the last bit of leaf from the
canister. The canister was no longer hers, neither the tea-pot, nor even
the battered old pewter spoon with which she tapped the bottom of the
tin to dislodge the last flicker of tea-leaf dust. The three had been
sold at auction that day in response to the auctioneer's inquiry, "What
am I bid for the lot?"

Nothing in the familiar old kitchen was hers, Angeline reflected, except
Abraham, her aged husband, who was taking his last gentle ride in the
old rocking-chair--the old arm-chair with painted roses blooming as
brilliantly across its back as they had bloomed when the chair was first
purchased forty years ago. Those roses had come to be a source of
perpetual wonder to the old wife, an ever present example.

Neither time nor stress could wilt them in a single leaf. When Abe took
the first mortgage on the house in order to invest in an indefinitely
located Mexican gold-mine, the melodeon dropped one of its keys, but the
roses nodded on with the same old sunny hope; when Abe had to take the