ns had been lifted, a little by a little. Patricia could
hardly have told you at what exact moment it was that she discovered
Miss Agatha--who continued of course to live with them--was a
dipsomaniac. Very certainly Rudolph Musgrave was not Patricia's
informant; it is doubtful if the colonel ever conceded his sister's
infirmity in his most private meditations; so that Patricia found the
cause of Miss Agatha's "attacks" to be an open secret of which everyone
in the house seemed aware and of which by tacit agreement nobody ever
spoke. It bewildered Patricia, at first, to find that as concerned
Lichfield at large any over-indulgence in alcohol by a member of the
Musgrave family was satisfactorily accounted for by the matter-of-course
statement that the Musgraves usually "drank,"--just as the Allardyces
notoriously perpetuated the taint of insanity, and the Townsends were
proverbially unable "to let women alone," and the Vartreys were
deplorably prone to dabble in literature. These things had been for a
long while just as they were to-day; and therefore (Lichfield estimated)
they must be reasonable.

Then, too, Patricia would have preferred to have been rid of the old
mulatto woman Virginia, because it was through Virginia that Miss Agatha
furtively procured intoxicants. But Rudolph Musgrave would not consider
Virginia's leaving. "Virginia's faithfulness has been proven by too many
years of faithful service" was the formula with which he dismissed the
suggestion ... Afterward Patricia learned from Miss Agatha of the wrong
that had been done Virginia by Olaf's uncle, Senator Edward Musgrave,
the noted ante-bellum orator, and understood that Olaf--without, of
course, conceding it to himself, because that was Olaf's way--was trying
to make reparation. Patricia respected the sentiment, and continued to
fret under its manifestation.

Miss Agatha also told Patricia of how the son of Virginia and Senator
Musgrave had come to a disastrous end--"lynched in Texas, I believe,
only it may not have been Texas. And indeed when I come to think of it,
I don't believe it was, because I know we first heard of it on a Monday,
and Virginia couldn't do the washing that week and I had to send it out.
And for the usual crime, of course. It simply shows you how much better
off the darkies were before the War," Miss Agatha said.

Patricia refrained from comment, not being willing to consider the
deduction strained. For love is a contagious infect