es you assume you do best your own
way."

Harriet arched her brows. "You mean, having found better results
followed the withdrawal of your oversight of me as mistress of our
house, you are going to let me alone in this?"

"Exactly," said her brother, "and therefore on the subject, now or
hereafter, I shall say no more." And it was eminently characteristic
of him that he never did.

Meanwhile up-stairs the child had gone through with the bath and the
supper like an automaton in Nelly's hands.

"She said 'yes' when I asked her anything," Nelly reported later to
the cook; "or she said 'no'. And her lips were set that hard she might
a'most have been Mr. Austen's own child."

And that was all Nelly saw in the little creature she tucked into the
huge, square bedstead under the bobinet mosquito bar. But no sooner
had Nelly's footsteps ceased along the hall than the child, as one
throwing off an armour of repression, rolled out of the high bed and
from under the bar, flinging and disarranging the neat covers with
passionate fury, sobbing wildly. A bead of gas lit the room. She
pattered across the floor to the opened trunk, and when the little
figure, stumbling over its gown, stole back to bed, a heartrendingly
battered, plaster-headed doll was clasped in its arms. And, as the
voices of children at play on the sidewalk came up through the open
windows, the child, shaken with crying--the more passionate because of
long repression--was declaring: "Sally Ann, baby, I couldn't never
have given you up, not even if I was your own truly mother, Sally Ann,
I couldn't, never."

CHAPTER THREE

Down-stairs the evening passed as evenings usually did when Harriet
and Austen were alone. There were not even the varyings from parlour
to front door that the heat seemed to necessitate for the rest of the
neighbourhood. Front porches are sociable things. The Blairs' was the
only house on the street without one.

The evening passed with the brother and sister at opposite sides of
the black, marble-topped table in the long parlour, she embroidering
on a strip of cambric with nice skill, he quickly and deftly cutting
the wrappers and pages of papers and magazines accumulated in his
absence. To undertake just what he could do justice to and keep
abreast of it, was the method by which he accomplished more than any
two men, in business, in church affairs, in civic duties, for the man
took his citizenship seriously. Both brother and si