K. Le Moyne slept diagonally in his bed, being very long. In sleep the
lines were smoothed out of his face. He looked like a tired, overgrown
boy. And while he slept the ground-squirrel ravaged the pockets of his
shabby coat.




CHAPTER II


Sidney could not remember when her Aunt Harriet had not sat at the table.
It was one of her earliest disillusionments to learn that Aunt Harriet
lived with them, not because she wished to, but because Sidney's father had
borrowed her small patrimony and she was "boarding it out." Eighteen years
she had "boarded it out." Sidney had been born and grown to girlhood; the
dreamer father had gone to his grave, with valuable patents lost for lack
of money to renew them--gone with his faith in himself destroyed, but with
his faith in the world undiminished: for he left his wife and daughter
without a dollar of life insurance.

Harriet Kennedy had voiced her own view of the matter, the after the
funeral, to one of the neighbors:--

"He left no insurance. Why should he bother? He left me."

To the little widow, her sister, she had been no less bitter, and more
explicit.