erted pride which is the stigmata of the criminal.

More than once I saw him writhe in his chair, tormented, shaken, spent
with futile curses, impotently lamenting his lost kingdom. He still
had the skill, the cold calculating brain, the wit, the will; and now,
by a cruel chance and a stupid accident, he had lost out! The end had
come for him, and he in his heyday! There were moments when, watching
him, I had the sensation as of witnessing almost visibly, here in our
calm sunny garden, the Dark Powers fighting openly for a soul.

_"For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against
principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of
this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places."_

CHAPTER IV

UNDERWINGS

If I have not heretofore spoken of Mary Virginia, it is because all
that winter she and Mrs. Eustis had been away; and in consequence
Appleboro was dull enough. For the Eustises are our wealthiest and
most important family, just as the Eustis house, with its pillared,
Greek-temple-effect front, is by far the handsomest house in town.
When we have important folks to entertain, we look to the Eustises to
save our faces for us by putting them up at their house.

One afternoon, shortly after we had gotten settled in Appleboro, I
came home to find my mother entertaining no less a personage than Mrs.
Eustis; she wasn't calling on the Catholic priest and his mother, you
understand; far from it! She was recognizing Armand De Rance and Adele
de Marsignan!

Mrs. Eustis was a fair, plump little partridge of a woman, so
perfectly satisfied with herself that brains, in her case, would have
amounted to a positive calamity. She is an instance of the fascination
a fool seems to have for men of undoubted powers of mind and heart,
for Eustis, who had both to an unusual degree, loved her devotedly,
even while he smiled at her. She had, after some years of
childlessness, laid him under an everlasting obligation by presenting
him with a daughter, an obligation deepened by the fact that the
child was in every sense her father's child, not her mother's.

That afternoon she brought the little girl with her, to make our
acquaintance. When the child, shyly friendly, looked up, it seemed to
me for an anguished moment as if another little girl had walked out of
the past, so astonishingly like was she to that little lost playmate
of my youth. Right then and there Mary Virginia walked into my heart