nian of bright
orange Chinese silk with a dark blue cord.

By the side of his curled black walnut bed, without drapery, and set,
like a French couch, low on three pairs of spiral legs, was a deep
cushioned chair into which he sank and dragged off his sodden buckskin
breeches. The room wavered and blurred in his weary vision--squat,
rush-bottomed Dutch chairs seemed to revolve about a table with
apparently a hundred legs, a bearskin floated across the floor.... He
secured the banian; and, swathing himself in its cool, sibilant folds,
he fell, his face hid in an angle of his arm, into an immediate profound
slumber.

The shadows of late afternoon were once more gathering when he woke. He
lay, with hands clasped behind his head, watching a roseate glow
disperse from the room. From without came the faint, clear voice of
Marta Appletofft, across the road at the farm, calling the chickens; and
he could hear the querulous whistling of the partridges that invariably
deserted the fringes of forest to join the domesticated flocks at feed
time. A sense of well-being flooded him; the project of St. Xavier, the
French forts, drew far away; never before had he found Myrtle Forge so
desirable. He was, he thought, growing definitely older. He was
twenty-five.

A light knock fell on his door, and he answered comfortably, thinking
that it was his mother. But it was Caroline, his oldest sister. "How you
have slept," she observed, closing the door at her back; "it was hardly
nine when you came in, and here it is five. Mother heard you." Caroline
Penny was a warm, unbeautiful girl with a fine, slender body, two years
younger than himself. Her colouring was far lighter than Howat's; she
had sympathetic hazel eyes, an inviting mouth, an illusive depression in
one cheek that alone saved her from positive ugliness, and tobacco brown
hair worn low with a long, turned strand. She had on a pewter-coloured,
informal wrap over a black silk petticoat, lacking hoops, with a cut
border of violet and silver brocade; and above low, green kid stays with
coral tulip blossoms worked on the dark velvet of foliage were glimpses
of webby linen and frank, young flesh.

She came to the edge of the bed, where she sat with a yellow morocco
slipper swinging from a silk clocked, narrow foot. He liked Caroline,
Howat lazily thought. Although she did not in the least resemble their
mother in appearance--she could not pretend to such distinction of
being--Caroline