st caught Winter
getting out of the lap of Spring. Then the three heads which had
unconsciously leaned together suddenly straightened up and turned in the
same direction.

Hugh stood almost over them. In one hand he held his aunt's knitting,
which he had mechanically rescued from the cat. Now he drew out one of
the ivory needles and snapped it into accurate halves. "This is
atrocious!" he said, with care and precision. His voice shook. "I shall
not touch a cent of it and"--he embraced his uncle and aunt in the same
devastating look--"neither will you if you have any sense of decency."

"I think--"

"It doesn't matter remotely what you--we think sir. What matters is what
Uncle Hugh thought." He turned to Mrs. Shirley with an extraordinary
softening of tone. "Couldn't you keep it? When he died ... in the room
over this"--with a little gasp her glance flew to the ceiling as though
this topographical detail had brought her a sharp realization of that
long-past scene--"he made us promise that you should have it, all of it.
He felt that you needed it; he worried about it."

"Oh, how kind of him--how kind!" cried the little woman. The poignancy
of her voice cut into his disappointment like a sharp ray of light.
"Even then--to think of me. But don't you understand that he wouldn't
want me to--to take anything that I felt I ought not to take?"

"That's the way out," rippled across Mr. Fowler's face. He was
experiencing a variety of mental disturbances, but this came to the
surface just in time for Hugh to catch it.

"Oh well," he murmured, wearily. "Only, none for this deficient child,
thank you." He walked to the window and stood looking out into the blown
spring green of the elm opposite. His ebbed anger had left a residuum of
stubbornness. There was still an act of justice to be consummated and
the position of grand-justicer offered a certain righteous attraction.
As he reminded himself, if you put your will to work on a difficult
action you were fain to commit, after a while the will worked
automatically and your mind functioned without aid from you, and the
action bloomed of itself. This kinetic process was a constant device of
the freakish impulse that he called his devil. He deliberately laid the
train.

"There is one more thing," the alien was saying. Her voice had gained a
wonderful fluency amid the general thaw. "I didn't dare to ask before,
but if we thought of me then--I have always hoped he left some message