ed in sin,
And born unholy and unclean.'"

The murmur of conversation in the adjoining rooms died away. Once or
twice after quiet descended, a little voice spoke out like the chirp of
a drowsy bird, brooded over by mother wings. Persis went softly down
the stairs. Joel waited long enough to make his advent impressive and
followed her.

She sat as he had seldom seen her, thrown back in the roomy recesses of
the big easy chair, her hands lying loosely in her lap. Her attitude
suggested the relaxation following fatigue. Her eyes were half closed,
her lips smiling. An indefinable rapture radiated from her. All her
life Persis Dale had been a resolutely cheerful person. But that
consistent, conscientious optimism was as unlike her present lightness
of heart as the heat of a coal fire, carefully fed and tended, differs
from the gracious warmth of June.

Singularly enough the sight of her satisfaction stirred her brother to
instant indignation. Up to this moment a sense of grievance had been
upper-most. Now he found himself shaken by hot anger. The instinct of
the male to dominate, outlasting the strength which sustains and
protects, spurred him on to have his way with her, to master this
madness which threatened the peace of his life.

"Persis," he began in a loud angry voice, "what's the meaning of this
piece of tom-foolishness?"

She opened her eyes and looked at him. After her two weeks' absence,
their longest separation in twenty years, she saw him almost as a
stranger would have done, a slight, undersized man with a bulging
forehead which told of nature's generous endowments, and the weak chin,
explaining his failure to measure up to the promise of his youth. His
disheveled hair and burning eyes gave an unprepossessing touch to the
picture. But the maternal feeling, always uppermost where her brother
was concerned, had been intensified by the children's advent. Persis
felt for the moment the indulgent disapproval of a mother toward an
unreasonable child.

"Why, Joel!" Her voice, with its new depth and richness, caressed the
name it uttered. "What's foolish about it?"

The gentleness of her answer misled him. He felt a sudden thrilling
conviction of his ability to bring her to terms.

"What's foolish about it? What ain't foolish, you'd better say. Looks
to me as if you'd taken leave of your senses. Filling up the house
with pauper brats."

The blood went out of her face. The smile lin