colonelcy, and had been raised to the rank of general by the unanimous
voice of his neighbours upon his return home. After an enthusiastic
reception at Kingsborough he had mounted a heavy-weight horse and ridden
out to the Hall, to find the grounds a tangle of weeds and his wife
with the pallor of death upon her brow. She had rallied at his coming,
had lingered some sad years an invalid in the great room next the
parlour, and had died quietly at last as she knelt in prayer beside her
high white bed.

For days after this the empty house was like a coffin. The children ran
in tears through the shuttered rooms, and the servants lost their
lingering shred of discipline. When the funeral was over, the general
made some spasmodic show of authority, but his heart was not in it, and
he wavered for lack of the sustaining hold of his wife's frail hand. He
dismissed the overseer and undertook to some extent the management of
the farm, but the crops failed and the hay rotted in the fields before
it was got into the barn. Then, as things were galloping from bad to
worse, a letter came from his sister, Miss Christina, and in a few days
she arrived with a cartload of luggage and a Maltese cat in a wicker
basket. From the moment when she stepped out of the carriage at the end
of the avenue and ascended the box-trimmed walk to the stone steps, the
difficulties disentangled and the domestic problems dwindled into the
simplest of arithmetical sums. By some subtle law of the influence of
the energetic she assumed at once the rights of authority. From the
master of the house to the field hands in the "quarters," all bent to
her regenerating rule. She opened the windows in the airy rooms, cleaned
off the storeroom shelves with soda and water, and put the marauding
small negroes to weeding the lawn. Before her passionate purification
the place was purged of the dust of years. The hardwood floors of the
wide old halls began to shine like mirrors, the assortment of odds and