ted them.
He felt a few rivets giving in the case he had hardened about himself
for so long a time. He thought he had got very hard indeed, and was even
willing to invite a knock or two, to test his induration. But there was
something curiously softening in this little group sitting in the shade
of the pleasant room while the sunshine outside played upon growing
leaves. He was conscious, wonderingly, that they all loved him very
much. His father's letters had told him that. It seemed simple and
natural, too, that these young women, who were not his sisters and who
gave him, in his rough habit of life, a curious pain with their delicacy
and softness--it seemed natural enough that they should, in a way not
understood, belong to him. He had got gradually accustomed to it, from
their growing up in his father's house from little girls to girls
dancing themselves into public favour, and then, again, he had been
living "outside" where ordinary conventions did not obtain. He had got
used to many things in his solitary thoughts that were never tested by
other minds in familiar intercourse. The two girls belonged there among
accepted things. He looked up suddenly at his father, and asked the
question they had least of all expected to hear:

"Where's Esther?"

The two girls made a movement to go, but he glanced at them frowningly,
as if they mustn't break up the talk at this moment, and they hesitated,
hand in hand.

"She's living here," said the colonel, "with her grandmother."

"Has that old harpy been over lately?"

"Madame Beattie?"

"Yes."

"Not to my knowledge."

Anne and Lydia exchanged looks. Madame Beattie was a familiar name to
them, but they had never heard she was a harpy.

"Was she Esther's aunt?" Lydia inquired, really to give the talk a jog.
She was accustomed to shake up her watch when it hesitated.

"Great-aunt," said Jeffrey. "Step-sister to Esther's grandmother. She
must be sixty-five where grandmother's a good ten years older."

"She sang," said the colonel, forgetting, as he often did, they seemed
so young, that everybody in America must at least have heard tradition
of Madame Beattie's voice. "She lived abroad."

"She had a ripping voice," said Jeff. "When she was young, of course.
That wasn't all. There was something about her that took them. But she
lost her voice, and she married Beattie, and he died. Then she came back
here and hunted up Esther."

His face settled into lines of sombre tho