fine
September weather young Frank's first birthday was celebrated with much
goodwill by everybody. Zachary, with the successful carrying of a rich
harvest, ceased to brood so much on the failure of humanity. He became
his own diligent self, amassing grain and gold and zealously expurgating
for reproduction in bleak chapels that winter a volume of sermons by an
Anglican bishop. Young Frank began to show distinct similarities of
feature to Jenny, similarities that not even the most critical observer
could demolish. He showed, too, some of her individuality, had a temper
and will of his own, and seemed like his mother born to inherit life's
intenser emotions. Jenny was not yet inclined to sink herself in him, to
transfer to the boy her own activity of sensation. Mrs. Raeburn was
thirty-three when Jenny was born: young Frank arrived when his mother
was ten years younger than that. It was not expected that she should
feel the gates of youth were closed against her. Moreover, Jenny, with
all the fullness of her experience, was strangely young on the eve of
her twenty-fourth birthday, still seeming, indeed, no more than eighteen
or nineteen. There was a divine youthfulness about her which was proof
against the Furies, and, since the diverting absurdities of young Frank,
laughter had come back. Those deep eyes danced again for one who from
altitudes of baby ecstasies would gloriously respond. May was another
triumph for affection. There was joy in regarding that little sister,
once wan with Islington airs, now happy and healthy and almost as
rose-pink as Jenny herself. How pleased her mother would have been, and,
in retrospect, how skeptical must she have felt of Jenny's ability to
keep that promise always to look after May.

Life was not so bad on her birthday morning, as, with one eye kept
continuously on young Frank, Jenny dressed herself to defy the
blusterous jolly October weather. She thought how red the apples were in
the orchard and with what a plump they fell and how she and May had
laughed when one fell on young Frank, who had also laughed, deeming
against the evidence of his surprise that it must be matter for
merriment.

The postman came that morning, and Granfa, waving his arms, brought the
letters up to the orchard--two letters, both for Jenny. He watched for a
minute her excitement before he departed to a pleasant job of digging in
the champagne of October sunlight.

"Hullo," cried Jenny, "here's a letter fro