steel in keeping the secret of our kin, certainly; but that
brings little joy, though some satisfaction perhaps.'

'You might be less despondent, I think. The tale-telling has been one of
the successes of the season.'

'Yes, I might; but I may observe that you scarcely set the example of
blitheness.'

'Ah--that's not because I don't recognize the pleasure of being here. It
is from a more general cause: simply an underfeeling I have that at the
most propitious moment the distance to the possibility of sorrow is so
short that a man's spirits must not rise higher than mere cheerfulness
out of bare respect to his insight.

"As long as skies are blue, and fields are green,
Evening must usher night, night urge the morrow,
Month follow month with woe, and year wake year to sorrow."'

Ethelberta bowed uncertainly; the remark might refer to her past conduct
or it might not. 'My great cause of uneasiness is the children,' she
presently said, as a new page of matter. 'It is my duty, at all risk and
all sacrifice of sentiment, to educate and provide for them. The grown-
up ones, older than myself, I cannot help much, but the little ones I
can. I keep my two French lodgers for the sake of them.'

'The lodgers, of course, don't know the relationship between yourself and
the rest of the people in the house?'

'O no!--nor will they ever. My mother is supposed to let the ground and
first floors to me--a strange lady--as she does the second and third
floors to them. Still, I may be discovered.'

'Well--if you are?'

'Let me be. Life is a battle, they say; but it is only so in the sense
that a game of chess is a battle--there is no seriousness in it; it may
be put an end to at any inconvenient moment by owning yourself beaten,
with a careless "Ha-ha!" and sweeping your pieces into the box.
Experimentally, I care to succeed in society; but at the bottom of my
heart, I don't care.'

'For that very reason you are likely to do it. My idea is, make ambition
your business and indifference your relaxation, and you will fail; but
make indifference your business and ambition your relaxation, and you
will succeed. So impish are the ways of the gods.'

'I hope that you at any rate will succeed,' she said, at the end of a
silence.

'I never can--if success means getting what one wants.'

'Why should you not get that?'

'It has been forbidden to me.'

Her complexion changed just enough to show that she kne