eeming to have
settled it all a long time before. "She was the most absolutely loving
person. You girls may be like her in that, too. I'm sure you're
inconceivably good to me."

"I'd like to love people to death," said Lydia, with the fierceness of
passion not yet named and recognised, but putting up its beautiful head
now and then to look her remindingly in the eyes. "I'd like to love
everybody. You first, Farvie, you and Anne. And Jeff. I'm going to love
Jeff like a house-a-fire. He doesn't know what it is to have a sister.
When he comes in I'm going to run up to him as if I couldn't wait to get
him into the room, and kiss him and say, 'Here we are, Jeff. I'm Lyddy.
Here's Anne.' You kiss him, too, Anne."

"Why," said Anne softly, "I wonder."

"You needn't stop to wonder," said Lydia. "You do it. He's going to
realise he's got sisters anyway--and a father."

The same thought sprang at once into their three minds. It was not
uncommon. They lived so close together, in such a unison of interests,
that their minds often beat accordingly. Anne hesitatingly voiced the
question.

"Do you think Esther'll meet him?"

"Impossible to say," the colonel returned, and Lydia's nipped lips and
warlike glance indicated that she found it hideously impossible to say.

"I intend to find out," said she.

"I have an idea," said her father, as if he were in the kindest manner
heading her off from a useless project, "that I'd better make a call on
her myself, perhaps at once."

"She wouldn't see you when you came before," Lydia reminded him, in a
hot rebellion against Jeff's wife who had not stood by him in his
downfall. In the space of time that he had been outside the line of
civilised life, an ideal of Jeff had been growing up in her own mind as
in Anne's. They saw him as the wronged young chevalier without reproach
whom a woman had forsaken in his need. Only a transcript of their
girlish dreams could have told them what they thought of Jeff. His
father's desolation without him, the crumbling of his father's life from
hale middle age to fragile eld, this whirling of the leaves of time had
seemed to bring them to a blazoned page where Jeff's rehabilitation
should be wrought out in a magnificent sequence. The finish to that
volume only: Jeff's life would begin again in the second volume, to be
annotated with the approbation of his fellows. He would be lifted on the
hands of men, their plaudits would upbear his soul, and he would