r to
hold any communication with them. Corona wept and obeyed him. She had
always obeyed her father; it had never entered into her mind to do
anything else. Meredith had resented her attitude hotly, and from that
day they had never spoken or met, while the years came and went, each
making a little wider and more hopeless the gulf of coldness and anger
and distrust.

Ten years later Roderick Gordon died, and in five months Alexis Gordon
followed him to the grave. The two brothers who had hated each other
so unyieldingly in life slept very peaceably side by side in the old
Gordon plot of the country graveyard, but their rancour still served
to embitter the lives of their descendants.

Corona, with a half-guilty sense of disloyalty to her father, hoped
that she and Meredith might now be friends again. He was married, and
had one little daughter. In her new and intolerable loneliness
Corona's heart yearned after her own people. But she was too timid to
make any advances, and Meredith never made any. Corona believed that
he hated her, and let slip her last fluttering hope that the old
breach would ever be healed.

"Oh, dear! oh, dear!" she sobbed softly into her pillows. It seemed a
terrible thing to her that one of her race and kin was to be married
and she could not be present at the ceremony, she who had never seen a
Gordon bride.

When Miss Corona went downstairs at last, she found Charlotta sobbing
in the kitchen porch. The small handmaiden was doubled up on the
floor, with her face muffled in her gingham apron and her long braids
of red hair hanging with limp straightness down her back. When
Charlotta was in good spirits, they always hung perkily over each
shoulder, tied up with enormous bows of sky-blue ribbon.

"What have you done this time?" asked Miss Corona, without the
slightest intention of being humorous or sarcastic.

"I've--I've bruk your green and yaller bowl," sniffed Charlotta.
"Didn't mean to, Miss C'rona. It jest slipped out so fashion 'fore I
c'd grab holt on it. And it's bruk into forty millyun pieces. Ain't I
the onluckiest girl?"

"You certainly are," sighed Miss Corona. At any other time she would
have been filled with dismay over the untoward fate of her green and
yellow bowl, which had belonged to her great-grandmother and had stood
on the hall table to hold flowers as long as she could remember. But
just now her heart was so sore over the Quarrel that there was no room
for other regrets