duty, a task, the exercising
of the horses. It hangs over me like a nightmare that I've got it to
do, until I've gone out and gotten it over."

"Yes," said Alexina, on familiar ground, "I know. I've hated those
horses too, before you. But you ought to be like Aunt Harriet, Emily;
don't be like me--tell him so."

Emily, unlocking the wardrobe door, suddenly flung up her arms against
it and hid her face in them. "I've tried, I have tried, and I can't--I
can't; I'm afraid of him, Alexina."

But the child coming--their child? Perhaps the child would make it
right. When it came, Emily would love her child? Perhaps she did; she
never talked about it afterwards, and Alexina never saw her with it;
it died in the summer, soon after its coming.

When she did see the two again, her uncle and Emily, on her own
return to Louisville in the late fall, the embarrassing playfulness
had left Uncle Austen. Perhaps the steely coldness of his manner was
worse. Had Emily dared--even in her mourning there was something about
her that was reckless. But she did not dare. She was twenty-two and he
was fifty-two, and she was to live afraid of him, to see him an old
man, for he is living now.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Harriet laughed at Alexina's wonder over her. "It took me a time to
realize that hospitality means the incidental oftener than the
invited," she confessed. "My guests, you know, Alexina, were formally
asked, and the other would have fretted me. That was why, I suppose, I
had no intimates."

Harriet never knew, it would seem, these days, whether the Judge, the
Colonel, Father Ryan, the man from the office chatting in the library
with the Major, one or all, were going to stay for supper or were not;
yet she had come to the place where she could smile in serene and
genuine welcome, the while everybody moved up and the coloured
housemaid slipped in an extra chair and plate.

And she only laid a hand on the spoon with which little Stevie
hammered his plate.

"I'd take it away and spank him myself, you know," confided Louise,
Stevie's mother, to Alexina; "I do spank William."

But all of life seemed to be moving for Harriet with serenity. Every
trivial happening was swallowed up in the joy that death had spared
her her husband. And the Major, whatever the agony, the horror,
preceding the acceptation of a maimed life, had not lost the vital
grace of humour. Life flowed in and out of the Rathbone home with him
for centre as it