ster had been
raised to economy of time, yet sometimes she mocked at herself for her
many excellencies and sometimes sighed, while he--

At ten o'clock Harriet rolled her work together and said good-night,
ascending the crimson-carpeted stairway with the unhurried movement of
an Olympian goddess; that is, if an Olympian goddess could have been
so genuinely above concern about it.

Her room, a front one on the second floor, had a look of spaciousness
and exquisite order. She moved about, adjusting a shade, setting a
gas-bracket at some self-imposed angle of correctness, giving the
sheets of the opened bed a touch of adjustment.

It was the price paid for the free exercise of individuality. Already,
at twenty-six, ways were becoming habits.

These things arranged, she passed to the adjoining room, from to-night
given to Alexina. Turning up the gas, Harriet glanced about at Nelly's
disposition of things, then moved to the bed.

Whatever were the emotions called forth by the relaxed little form,
softly and regularly breathing against a battered doll, or by the
essentially babyish face with the fine, flaxen hair damp and clinging
about the forehead, the Blairs were people to whom restraint was
second nature. Whatever Harriet felt showed only in solicitude for the
child who had thrown aside all cover. But as she drew the sheet and
light blanket up, her hand touched the smoothness of a bared little
limb. It brought embarrassment. She had but once before touched the
bareness of another's body, and that her mother's, and in death.

Was it shame, this surging of strange hotness through her?

The refuge of a Blair was always action. She stepped to the bay of the
room and drew the shutters against the night-wind.

Between the windows stood the bureau. Harriet paused, arrested by a
daguerreotype in a velvet case open upon it. The child must have left
it there. She sat down and laying the picture on her knee, regarded
it, her chin in her palm.

It was the face of the father of the sleeping child, dead less than a
year, for whom his sister was wearing this black trailing in folds
about her.

And looking on his face, she recalled another, exquisite in pallor,
with shadowy lashes, the face of Molly, who ten months after
Alexander's death had married again; who not only married but gave up
her child. Had it been the purpose of Alexander to test her for the
child's sake? She had been given her third and the child the same,
wi