mother, too, about the mouth.”

The child moved under the scrutiny, but her gaze, returning the study, did not falter.

Harriet laughed; was it at this imperturbability? “I think,” she decided, “we may consider her a Blair.” Then to the white maid-servant entering: “You may order supper, Nelly, for Mr. Blair and myself. This is Alexina, and, I should say, tired out. Suppose you give her a warm bath and let her go right to bed—have you her trunk key, Austen?—and I will send a tray up with her supper afterward.”

Then, as Nelly took the key and went out, Harriet addressed her brother. “For, apart from the hygienic advantages of the bath before the supper, I confess”—with faintly discernible amusement—“to a fancy for the ceremony as a form, so to speak, emblematic of a moral washing and a fresh start.” She ended with a raising of her brows as she regarded her brother.

Austen Blair had no use for levity. Mild as this was, he dismissed it curtly. “I would suggest,” he said, “that you avoid personalities; it can but be injudicious for any child to hear itself discussed.”

Again Harriet laughed; she was provokingly good-humoured. “Coming from her nine years of life beneath Molly’s expansive nature, I don’t think you need fear for what she’ll gather from me.” She took the child’s hand and lifted her from the chair. “Here is Nelly, Alexina; go with her and do what she says. Say good-night to your uncle. Supper, Austen.”

The dining-room being sombre, one might have said it accorded with the master, whose frown had not all cleared away.

Harriet was speaking. “What of Molly? Was there a scene at parting with her voluntarily given-up offspring? For her moods, like her tempers, used to delight in being somewhat inconsistent and mixed.”

“She has in no way changed,” replied Austen. Was it this flat conciseness in all he said that made levity irresistible to Harriet in turn? “My interview with her was confined to business. That ended, she told me, as an afterthought, apparently, that the coloured woman was going to remain with her, and she supposed Alexina could manage on the train. She also told me that her husband had severed connection with the legation and was going back to Paris. Alexina was not with them at the hotel, but with her uncle, Senator Randolph, from whose house Molly was married.”

“And Molly’s parting with the child—”

“Was a piece with it all, tears and relief, just as you would have expected.”

“And the husband’s, this Mr. Garnier’s, attitude?”

“Was enigmatical; how far he understands the situation I had no means of judging.”

“I’m sorry for the child, though,” said Harriet suddenly, “for if there is anything of Molly in her, life according to the Blair standard may pall, and,” whimsically, “her mixture of natures be vexed within her.”

Austen took the Blairs seriously, and at any time he disliked the personal or the playful. He spoke coldly. “Having given the child over to you from the moment of arrival, of this initiatory tone you are taking I shall say no more. Duties you assume you do best your own way.”

Harriet arched her brows. “You mean, having found better results followed the withdrawal of your oversight of me as mistress of our house, you are going to let me alone in this?”

“Exactly,” said her brother, “and therefore on the subject, now or hereafter, I shall say no more.” And it was eminently characteristic of him that he never did.

Meanwhile up-stairs the child had gone through with the bath and the supper like an automaton in Nelly’s hands.

“She said ‘yes’ when I asked her anything,” Nelly reported later to the cook; “or she said ‘no’. And her lips were set that hard she might a’most have been Mr. Austen’s own child.”

And that was all Nelly saw in the little creature she tucked into the huge, square bedstead under the bobinet mosquito bar. But no sooner had Nelly’s footsteps ceased along the hall than the child, as one throwing off an armour of repression, rolled out of the high bed and from under the bar, flinging and disarranging the neat covers with passionate fury, sobbing wildly. A bead of gas lit the room. She pattered across the floor to the opened trunk, and when the little figure, stumbling over its gown, stole back to bed, a heartrendingly battered, plaster-headed doll was clasped in its arms. And, as the voices of children at play on the sidewalk came up through the open windows, the child, shaken with crying—the more passionate because of long repression—was declaring: “Sally Ann, baby, I couldn’t never have given you up, not even if I was your own truly mother, Sally Ann, I couldn’t, never.”

CHAPTER THREE

Down-stairs the evening passed as evenings usually did when Harriet and Austen were alone. There were not even the varyings from parlour to front door that the heat seemed to necessitate for the rest of the neighbourhood. Front porches are sociable things. The Blairs’ was the only house on the street without one.

The evening passed with the brother and sister at opposite sides of the black, marble-topped table in the long parlour, she embroidering on a strip of cambric with nice skill, he quickly and deftly cutting the wrappers and pages of papers and magazines accumulated in his absence. To undertake just what he could do justice to and keep abreast of it, was the method by which he accomplished more than any two men, in business, in church affairs, in civic duties, for the man took his citizenship seriously. Both brother and sister had been raised to economy of time, yet sometimes she mocked at herself for her many excellencies and sometimes sighed, while he—

At ten o’clock Harriet rolled her work together and said good-night, ascending the crimson-carpeted stairway with the unhurried movement of an Olympian goddess; that is, if an Olympian goddess could have been so genuinely above concern about it.

Her room, a front one on the second floor, had a look of spaciousness and exquisite order. She moved about, adjusting a shade, setting a gas-bracket at some self-imposed angle of correctness, giving the sheets of the opened bed a touch of adjustment.

It was the price paid for the free exercise of individuality. Already, at twenty-six, ways were becoming habits.

These things arranged, she passed to the adjoining room, from to-night given to Alexina. Turning up the gas, Harriet glanced about at Nelly’s disposition of things, then moved to the bed.

Whatever were the emotions called forth by the relaxed little form, softly and regularly breathing against a battered doll, or by the essentially babyish face with the fine, flaxen hair damp and clinging about the forehead, the Blairs were people to whom restraint was second nature. Whatever Harriet felt showed only in solicitude for the child who had thrown aside all cover. But as she drew the sheet and light blanket up, her hand touched the smoothness of a bared little limb. It brought embarrassment. She had but once before touched the bareness of another’s body, and that her mother’s, and in death.

Was it shame, this surging of strange hotness through her?

The refuge of a Blair was always action. She stepped to the bay of the room and drew the shutters