eived more boxes of
chocolates and more dolls than her sister had received during her whole
lifetime. This was not, however, because the younger child was in any
respect more beautiful than the elder, but rather owing to the younger's
extraordinary gift for securing what she wanted by any means that might
come to hand.

For a long while Cleopatra had looked on, wistfully it is true, but not
enviously at her sister's astonishingly successful career: for was not
Baby only a child after all? And, from the age of eleven to fourteen,
Leonetta had been so outrageously gawky and unattractive, no matter how
beautifully she happened to be clad, that Cleopatra's feelings of
uneasiness about her sister were laid to rest as if for ever during this
period.

Then, all of a sudden--and the day was written indelibly on the elder
girl's memory--on a certain spring morning, at the time of year when
winter frocks are doffed for lighter and brighter confections, Cleopatra
beheld a vision, the nature of which was such as in a trice to
resuscitate all those anxieties about her junior which, to do her
justice, she had long ago relegated to oblivion.

The event occurred in Mrs. Delarayne's bedroom. Cleopatra, then a girl
of twenty-two, was discussing with her mother the details of the Easter
holiday programme and with her back to the door and her face to the
window, was as completely unconscious of the surprise awaiting her as
the bedroom furniture itself.

All at once the door opened. At first Cleopatra did not turn round, and
it was only when the exceptionally fulsome manner of her mother's
outburst of joy awakened her suspicions that at last she looked round
and was confronted by the vision.

It was Baby--undoubtedly it was Baby; but certainly not the awkward
child of a month, of a week, of a day, or even an hour ago. It was Baby
transformed, nay transfigured, as if by magic. Whether the change had
been gradual and imperceptible, or as sudden as Cleopatra imagined it to
have been, the elder girl did not stop to think; she simply allowed her
eyes to dwell almost spellbound upon the startling apparition facing
her, and as quickly as a dart, before she was able to arrest it, a pang,
a pain, or a convulsion of some sort, was communicated to her heart, the
meaning of which she did not dare at first to analyse.

For Leonetta, from a Mohawk, from a sexless savage with tangled hair and
blotchy features, from an angular filly devoid of grace