ot
help feeling she would have regarded it with very friendly eyes, would
have urged strongly its acceptance. Why, she had even been anxious for
Jenny to make a match with a baker; and here was a prosperous man, a
religious man, a steady man, inviting her to be mistress almost of a
country estate. She wished that Mr. Z. Trewhella were not so willing to
wait. It made him appear so sure, so inevitable. And the time for moving
was getting very near. Change was in the air. Jenny thought she would
sound May's views on the future in case of sudden accident or any
deliberate alteration of the present mode of life.

"Where would you live if I went away?" she asked.

"What do you mean?" said May, looking very much alarmed by the prospect,
and turning sharply on her pillow.

"I mean who would you live with? Alfie or Edie?"

"Neither," May affirmed emphatically.

"Why not?"

"Because I wouldn't."

This reply, however unsatisfactory it might have been to a logician, was
to Jenny the powerfullest imaginable.

"But supposing I got married?" she went on.

"Well, couldn't I live with you? No, I suppose I couldn't," said May
dejectedly. "I'm a lot of good, ain't I? Yes, you grumble sometimes, but
what about if you was like me?"

Jenny had always accepted May's cheerfulness under physical disability
so much as a matter of fact that a complaint from her came with a shock.
More than ever did the best course for May seem the right course for
Jenny. She recalled how years ago her mother had intrusted May to her
when a child. How much more sacred and binding was that trust now that
she who imposed it was dead.

"Don't get excited," said Jenny, petting her little sister. "Whatever I
done or wherever I went, you should come along of me."

May, not to display emotion, said:

"Well, you needn't go sticking your great knee in my back." But Jenny
knew by the quickness with which she fell asleep that May was happy and
secure.

"I'm going to have a rare old rout out this morning," Jenny announced
when she woke up to the sight of an apparently infinitely wet day, a
drench in a gray monotone of sky from dawn to nightfall.

About eleven o'clock the rout out began and gradually the accumulated
minor rubbish of a quarter of a century was stacked in various heaps all
over the house.

"What about mother's things?" May inquired.

"I'm going to put them all away in a box. I'm going through them this
afternoon," said Jenny.

"I've prom