noticed before, and the cow browsing beside the brook where the white
ducks paddled, gossiping.

"Oh, yes, often," said the busy sister (she was Hester; the other was
Ann). "We are never without some one. So many people are ill in the
city. Now I am going to clean your room, and perhaps you will feel
like stepping out on the balcony?"

Surprised, for she had not seen any such addition to the simple frame
house, she stepped through a window cut down somewhat clumsily, but
efficiently enough, and hinged to swing outward, onto a shallow, roofed
_loggia_ with vines grown from boxes on the sides and two long, low
chairs faced to the view of the hills. In one of these sat a woman,
slender and motionless, whose glistening white wrapper seemed to melt
in the strong sun into the white of the painted wooden balustrade that
protected the balcony. Flushed with an invalid's quick irritation and
resentful of any other occupant, for her raw nerves were not yet
healed, she was about to turn back hastily into the room when a second
glance assured her that it was only one of her own white wrappers
draped along the chair. The face and hands that her vexed irritation
must have supplied amazed her, in retrospect, with their distinctness
of outline, and she trembled at her weak nerves.

From inside the room came the swishing of water and the sound of
scrubbing; soon the strong clean flavour of soapy boards floated out,
and the flick of the drops into the pail; from where she sat she could
see out of the corner of her eye the fluff of snowy suds that foamed
over the shining bucket as Hester rubbed the milky cake of soap with
the bristles. Her strong strokes had a definite rhythm and set the
time for the stern old hymn-tune she crooned. The listener on the
balcony obeyed her growing interest and turned her chair to face into
the room. The kilted Hester, on her knees, her brow bound with a
glistening towel, threw her body forward with the regularity of a
rower, her strong, muscled arms shot out in a measured curve; on her
little island of dry boards she sang amid her clean, damp sea,
high-priestess of a lustral service as old as the oldest temple of man,
and the odour of her incense, the keen, sweet freshness of her
cleansing soap, rose to the heaven of her hymn.

"You sing as if you liked it," said the watcher.

"And so I do," said Hester. "Things must be clean, and I like to make
them so."

"Why, you are doing just what we d