"For there is no use ordering a
supper for five hundred if but four hundred and ninety-nine are
coming," he told her.

"No?" said Harriet.

"Exactly," said her brother.

Alexina, present at the conversation, looked from the one to the
other. Uncle Austen was Uncle Austen; there was a slight lift of the
girlish shoulders as she admitted this. But Aunt Harriet--

For Harriet had changed. She had been changing these past two summers.
She was absent, forgetful, absorbed, even irritable. Aunt Harriet! And
recalled, she would colour and look about in startled fashion.

Alexina and Harriet had been always on terms friendly and pleasant,
but scarcely to be called intimate; terms that, after a cordial
good-night, closed the door between their rooms, and while the girl
had been conscious of a fondness for her serene and capable aunt,
there were times too, when, met by that same serenity, she had felt
she must rebel, and in secret had thrown her young arms out in
impotent, passionate protest.

But now Aunt Harriet forgot and neglected and grew cross like any one,
and the sententious utterances of Uncle Austen irritated her. Alexina,
going into her room one day, found her with her head bowed on the
desk. Was she crying? The girl slipped out.

Was Aunt Harriet unhappy? The heart of Alexina warmed to her.

The evening of Alexina's return home Harriet had come to her door. To
twenty years thirty-eight seems pitiably far along in life, yet
Harriet called up no such feeling in Alexina. No passion of living
writ itself on Galatea's check while she was in marble, and Alexina,
opening the door to the tap, thought her aunt beautiful.

"If there are callers to-night," Harriet said, "I want you to come
down. My friends are not too elderly," she smiled in the old,
good-humoured way, "to be nice to you this winter."

So later Alexina went down to the library, a room long unfurnished,
now the only really cheerful room in the house. Was it because Harriet
had furnished it?

The girl always had realized in an indefinite way that Harriet was a
personage; later, in their summers away together, she discovered that
men liked her handsome aunt.

In the library she found a group who, from the conversation, seemed to
be accustomed to dropping in thus in casual fashion. They were men of
capacity and presence, one felt that, even in the case of that long
avowed person of fashion, Mr. Marriot Bland, who was getting
dangerously near to that t