to the Major's, with
Harriet.

She was childlike and small and was looking at Harriet, helpless and
frightened. She was, it proved, twenty-three years old, and a widow
with two children.

"And Stevie takes care of us," she explained. "Stevie" was the Major;
"us" was herself and the babies.

She had brought both the babies. "I couldn't leave them and come, you
know," she said.

One of them lay on the bed, asleep, a little chap four years old, his
coat unfastened, his hair tumbled. The other, the younger, asleep too,
lay on the mother's knee, Harriet regarding him. He was aquiline, lean
and handsome, baby as he was, like a little deer hound.

"His name is Stevie," said Stephen's sister.

Harriet looked up from the child to the mother, almost jealously.
"Then he is mine, too; I have some part in him too, since his name is
Stephen."

CHAPTER FOUR

For two months Austen Blair and his niece lived on in the big house.

Alexina wondered if her uncle were not different from other people,
for it must be the abnormal human who would not ask one question about
his sister; mere curiosity must have demanded that much, Alexina
thought, having a lively curiosity herself. To be sure, Aunt Harriet,
from Uncle Austen's standpoint, had outraged every convention to which
they had been bred; she had married a man between whom and her family
there had been bitterest enmity, between whom and her brother there
had been personal encounter; she had gone from her brother's roof to
be married in a Catholic institution, by a Catholic priest.

It almost made Alexina laugh when she summed up the enormity of the
offending. She gloried in it herself; she adored Aunt Harriet and
loved her for it.

But the fact that her uncle could thus ignore the whole subject made
it harder for Alexina to go to him about a matter which had arisen
concerning herself.

A letter had come to her from her mother. Though it was eleven years
since she had seen the handwriting, she knew it, as Katy, bringing the
mail, handed it to her.

It seemed to Alexina that her pulses stopped and the tide of her blood
flowed backward. Katy, closing the door as she went, brought her to
herself, and she flung the letter from her the width of the room, her
gaze following it.

She sat like one stunned with horror. Then rage succeeded. "What
right had this--this so-called mother to write to her?"

But she need not read it, and Alexina sprang up and went about her
h