LITMIR.BIZ

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as it is possible for human lips to utter words.

      Miss Eliza extricated herself from the embrace without interrupting her progress.

      "We considered it best, your Aunt 'Titia and I and your Aunt 'Senath," (She never spoke of herself and Arethusa's other great-aunts in any different way or order, and why, no one could tell) "to discuss it thoroughly among ourselves before we said anything to you about it. It was a very unexpected letter; almost a shock, I might say, the contents. It came yesterday afternoon. I wish, Arethusa, that you would learn not to be so violent. You could have asked me about it without nearly strangling me."

      Every fibre of Arethusa's body quivered with impatience. What little self-control she had, and Miss Eliza would have named it none at all, was only managed with the greatest difficulty. Behind her aunt's leadership she proceeded with little hops and skips. Her tongue burned with all the rest of those questions she was so longing to ask.

      A Letter from Father in the house ever since yesterday afternoon, and she had not even seen it! It was the one time in weeks that she had not gone down to the mail-box for the mail! So it always happened!

      Suddenly Miss Eliza turned.

      "You make me so nervous, Arethusa, jumping up and down that way behind me, I could scream! Can't you walk!" Then she added, half to herself and rather irrelevantly too, considering the gist of the foregoing conversation. "I must say that I question very strongly the wisdom of Sister 'Titia's decision."

      All decisions were, nine cases out of ten, wholly Miss Eliza's; but in conversation responsibility for them was generally shifted to Miss Letitia.

      Arethusa made a noble effort to compose herself and did her very utmost to walk as she had been requested.

      From long experience of her aunt, she knew it would do no earthly good to ask a single one of those questions she so desired to have answered. Miss Eliza told a person all that was necessary when she was quite ready for it, herself, and without the least regard as to the state of feverish impatience to which such a proceeding might bring a petitioner. And very often, Arethusa had also discovered, questioning delayed the wished-for loosening of Miss Eliza's tongue.

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

      Miss Eliza paused to shut the front door carefully behind them, latching it against the storm; and Arethusa ran on ahead into the sitting-room at one end of the big, square hall, a "dog-trot" hall which went straight through the centre of the house from front porch to back porch.

      This place known as the "sitting-room" was a nondescript apartment crowded with furniture of varied sorts, till every available space was occupied by something. It was too crowded to be really pleasing when one entered it for the first time and yet it possessed certain and unmistakable charm; which was a charm Miss Asenath may have given. Her couch dominated everything, drawn across between the two south windows. But whatever it was, one undoubtedly had a feeling of something about the sitting-room which made it lovable after being in it the shortest possible time.

      The furniture which made it seem crowded ran from a new and shiny sewing-machine of very recent purchase, through some pieces belonging unmistakably to the period of temperamentally carved walnut of a generation or so ago, back to the plain wood and simple lines of Colonial days. Miss Eliza's high old secretary, placed to get the best possible light for her slightly near-sighted eyes which she obstinately refused to admit were anything but perfect in their vision, was of the last description. The secretary stood open always, and was of a consistently immaculate order. The neat little piles of papers and account-books in the various pigeon-holes were arranged so precisely they looked as if they had never been touched since first put in their places, and yet the owner spent many industrious moments, nearly every day, working with them. The piano, which sat almost directly opposite the secretary, was of a trifle later construction. It was large and square, of inlaid rosewood, with handsomely carved legs, and had mother-of-pearl keys faintly tinged with brown all around their edges. From end to end, lengthwise of its top, was a long narrow piece of dark red satin decorated with bunches of tall cat-tails heavily painted in oils. Scattered music lay all over the piano, on the music-rack, sliding down on the keys, and in small, untidy piles hastily placed on the red satin cover. Its scattered condition was conclusive evidence that Arethusa had been handling it, for she was the only person on the place who ever scattered anything about so untidily. There was a wicker sewing-basket in the room, Miss Letitia's property. And a large and pompous what-not of black walnut, elaborately and fantastically carved, guarded the corner nearest the door, bearing as its pièce de resistance a bunch of wax flowers under a glass case, flowers shaped by Miss Asenath's gentle fingers a great many years ago; one or two shells wearing landscapes in oils—of colors and tints never yet seen in an actual landscape—also reminiscent of Miss Asenath's artistic girlhood; and several other non-utilitarian objects of varying degrees of beauty, according to the personal taste of the beholder. A much larger shell than those on the what-not, with a landscape containing a cow and other objects no doubt intended as human, propped open the door into the hall. A white marble clock, with a large piece of white coral lying on its top and under a glass case like the wax flowers, ticked away on the high mantel in the dignified and quiet way which befitted a clock belonging to the Redfields. And there were many other pieces of furniture and bits of old-fashioned ornament in the room.

      The various generations and the lives which each one had lived at the Farm might almost be known by observation of these things in the sitting-room. Each generation and its occupations had seemed to leave behind it an imprint in furniture and ornament.

      But had the sitting-room not been a room of rather unusual dimensions, it could never have held all of the diversified objects gathered in it. And they were gathered in it of real necessity, for all the life of the house centered about Miss Asenath, and in this room she spent her whole waking time. Miss Asenath had not left the couch between the two south windows for over fifty years, except to be lifted from it to her bed at night and back to it again in the morning for another day.

      She was as tiny as Miss Eliza, but even thinner, and her delicate features made her profile seem like a deliciously tinted cameo against the faded tan of the sitting-room wall. She had an abundance of soft white hair that waved like a fleecy cloud about her face. Her skin was white and waxen clear; her loose gown was of woolly material, white and spotless; the pillows piled all around her were all in immaculate white cases; and though her lips still held a faded rose and her eyes gleamed dark, the only real spot of color anywhere immediately about her was a fluffy wool afghan of a heaven-like shade of deep blue spread across the lower part of her helpless body.

      Miss Asenath loved all that had color: the gold of sunlight across the sitting-room floor; the green of the grass and the waxen-leaved coral honeysuckle just outside the sitting-room windows; she even loved the wax flowers because they were so gay. But Miss Letitia loved just as dearly to dress her all in white to match her hair and skin (Miss Letitia was the seamstress for the whole family); so there was a compromise. Miss Asenath wore the soft white gowns of Miss Letitia's making and, with Miss Letitia's own connivance, indulged her fancy for colors in her afghans, which she had in every conceivable shade.

      Long ago, Miss Asenath had had a Romance.

      She had always been the acknowledged beauty of the family in her Dresden china loveliness, and she had been little more than a child when love had come to her in all the wonder and ecstacy of loving that belongs to youth. But a fall from her riding horse had left her pinned to this couch, never to walk again, so she had sent her boy-lover away.

      And although she had known him grow old and had watched him live a full life apart from hers (a life actually ended only a very few years ago), she had seemed to see him always as the boy belonging to her girlhood, to those months she had claimed him as her own. She wore his picture in a locket at her throat hung on a piece of ribbon the color of the afghan for that day. It was a miniature of a smiling boy with waving blonde hair brushed high above his forehead in an unmistakable roll, with eyes of a very deep shade of blue, and dressed in a high stock and

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