tide of hospitality--and crewel work went out of fashion.

In her sister's home she became a constant guest--one to be offered the
favoured share and to be treated with tender, increasing tolerance--not
to be loved. Since the death of her parents none had loved her, though
many had borne gently with her spoiled fancies. But her coming in had
brought no light, and her going out had left nothing dark. She was old
and ill-tempered and bitter of speech, and, though all doors opened
hospitably at her approach, all closed quickly when she was gone. Her
spoiled youth had left her sensitive to trivial stings, unforgivable to
fancied wrongs. In a childish oversight she detected hidden malice and
implacable hate in a thoughtless jest. Her bitterness and her years
waxed greater together, and she lost alike her youth and her
self-control. When she had yearned for passionate affection she had
found kindly tolerance, and the longings of her hidden nature, which
none knew, were expressed in rasping words and acrid tears. Once, some
years after Bernard's birth, she had called him into her room as she sat
among her relics, and had shown him the daguerreotype.

"It's pitty lady," the child had lisped, and she had caught him suddenly
to her lean old breast, but he had broken into peevish cries and
struggled free, tearing with his foot the ruffle of the swiss muslin
gown.

"Oo ain't pitty lady," he had said, and Aunt Griselda had risen and
pushed him into the hall with sharp, scolding words, and had sat down to
darn the muslin ruffle with delicate, old-fashioned stitches.

It was only when all living love had failed her that she returned to the
dead. She had gathered the letters of nearly sixty years ago from the
bottom of the cedar chest, reading them through her spectacles with
bleared, watery eyes. Those subtle sentimentalities which linger like
aromas in a heart too aged for passion were liberated by the bundle of
yellow scrawls written by hands that were dust. As she sat in her stiff
bombazine skirts beside the opened chest, peering with worry-ravaged
face at the old letters, she forgot that she was no longer one with the
girl in the muslin frock, and that the inciter of this exuberant emotion
was as dead as the emotion itself.

When the dresses were brought up to her she would put them on again and
go down to flinch before kindly eyes and to make embittered speeches in
her high, shrill voice. Outwardly she grew more soured and m