e had promptly disowned it.

But to-day Mrs. Pemberton's shame did not too much affect her offspring,
who sat, not quite so upright now, squeezing the blood from the finger
that Sissy's needle had pricked.

"Let me look at your embroidery, Cecilia," said the lady, patronizingly.

Sissy rose and brought it to her. Before Crosby she tried not to show
it, but this little Madigan was really suffering in her perfect soul:
she embroidered so badly, and knew it so well.

"H'm!" Mrs. Pemberton drew off her glove. "Make your stitches even, and
keep your work clean--like this--like this--see?"

Sissy saw. Under the firm, big, white hand the strawberry leaves and
blossoms sprang up and flourished. Mrs. Pemberton loved to embroider;
her voice was almost gentle when she painted on linen with her needle,
and then only did she forget to bully her boy.

"Perhaps you will play for us, Cecilia, if I do a bit of your work for
you?"

Sissy knew it was coming. Mrs. Pemberton always asked her to play, and
playing for company was pure show-off from a Madigan point of view.
Split would hear and taunt her with it later, she knew. But though she
scorned the servile and downtrodden Crosby, Sissy, no more than he,
dared disobey that grenadier, his mother. She took her seat at the
piano, opened a Beethoven that Mrs. Pemberton had given her the last
Christmas, under the impression that she was fostering a taste for the
classical, and, with a revengeful little hand that couldn't reach the
octaves, she began to murder the "Funeral March."

Just as the performer let her hands fall upon the last somber chord (her
puritanical soul enjoying the double dissipation of pretending to
herself while she afflicted others), she lifted her eyes to the mirror
over the piano and saw Irene out in the hall. In the mirror their eyes
met, and the mockery in Irene's was unmistakable as Sissy rose,
agitated, caught in the very act of showing off, convicted of being
affected.

"Very pretty; very pretty, indeed!" said Mrs. Pemberton,
absent-mindedly. "Now play another little waltz."

"Aunt Anne says, Mrs. Pemberton," put in Irene, entering, "will you come
to her room?"

Mrs. Pemberton rose, her deft hands still calling forth the perfection
of fruit from the stubborn linen soil upon which Sissy could make
nothing grow, and sailed across the hall. Crosby immediately jumped from
his chair.

"I say, Sissy," he cried, "I know an awful swell way to cut paper-doll