she made me quite ill once by some dreadful hints she let fall about
him."

She leaned back wearily as if the conversation had exhausted her, while
the peacock firescreen slipped from her hand and dropped on the white
fur rug at her feet.

"If you'll call Kesiah, Jonathan, I'll go upstairs for a rest," she said
gently, yet with a veiled reproach. "The journey tired me, but I forgot
it in the pleasure of seeing you."

All contrition at once, he hastily summoned Kesiah from the storeroom,
and between them, with several solicitous maids in attendance, they
carried the fragile little lady up to her chamber, where a fire of
resinous pine was burning in the big colonial fireplace.

An hour afterwards, when Kesiah had seen her sister peacefully dozing,
she went, for the first time since her return, into her own bedroom, and
stood looking down on the hearth, where the servants had forgotten to
light the sticks that were laid cross-wise on the andirons. It was the
habit of those about her to forget her existence, except when she
was needed to render service, and after more than fifty years of such
omissions, she had ceased, even in her thought, to pass judgment upon
them. In her youth she had rebelled fiercely--rebelled against nature,
against the universe, against the fundamental injustice that divided her
sister's lot from her own. Generations existed only to win love or to
bestow it. Inheritance, training, temperament, all combined to develop
the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these--some
external shaping of clay--had unfitted her for the purpose for which
she was designed. And since, in the eyes of her generation, any