Aurelia's share of the modest Sawyer property
had been put into one thing after another by the
handsome and luckless Lorenzo de Medici. He had
a graceful and poetic way of making an investment
for each new son and daughter that blessed their
union. "A birthday present for our child, Aurelia,"
he would say,--"a little nest-egg for the future;"
but Aurelia once remarked in a moment of bitterness
that the hen never lived that could sit on
those eggs and hatch anything out of them.

Miranda and Jane had virtually washed their
hands of Aurelia when she married Lorenzo de
Medici Randall. Having exhausted the resources
of Riverboro and its immediate vicinity, the
unfortunate couple had moved on and on in a steadily
decreasing scale of prosperity until they had reached
Temperance, where they had settled down and
invited fate to do its worst, an invitation which was
promptly accepted. The maiden sisters at home
wrote to Aurelia two or three times a year, and sent
modest but serviceable presents to the children at
Christmas, but refused to assist L. D. M. with the
regular expenses of his rapidly growing family.
His last investment, made shortly before the birth
of Miranda (named in a lively hope of favors which
never came), was a small farm two miles from
Temperance. Aurelia managed this herself, and so
it proved a home at least, and a place for the
unsuccessful Lorenzo to die and to be buried from, a duty