modern miracle of enamel tiling and shining glass. Across the
sun-flooded back of the house were Alice's little bedroom, nunlike in
its rigid austerity, her nurse's room adjoining, and a square sun-room,
giving glimpses of roofs and trim back-gardens, full of flowers, with a
little fountain and goldfish, a floor of dull pink tiling, and plants in
great jars of Chinese enamel. Christopher had planned this delightful
addition to Alice's domain only a few years ago, and, with that
knowledge of her secret heart that only Christopher could claim, had let
her share the pleasure of designing and arranging it. It stretched out
across the west side of the spacious backyard, almost touching the
branches of the great plane tree, and when, after the painful move to
her mother's house, and the necessary absence during the building of it,
Alice had been brought back to this new evidence of their love and
goodness, she had buried her face against Christopher's shoulder, and
told him that she didn't think people with all the world to wander in
had ever had anything lovelier than this!

One of the paintings that Alice might look at idly, in the silence of
the winter noon, was of a daisied meadow, stretching between walls of
heavy summer woodland to the roof of a half-buried farmhouse in the
valley below. The other picture was of the very mother who was coming
toward Alice now, in the jolting omnibus. But it was a younger mother,
and a younger Alice, that had been captured by the painter's genius. It
was a stout, imperious, magnificently gowned woman, of not much more
than thirty, in whose spreading silk lap a fair little girl was sitting.
This little earnest-eyed child was Alice at seven. The splendid,
dark-eyed, proud-looking boy of about fourteen, who stood beside the
mother, was Teddy, her only son, dead now for many years, and perhaps
mercifully dead. The fourth and last person pictured was the elder
daughter, Annie, who had been about nine years old then, Alice
remembered. Annie and Alice had been unusually alike, even for sisters,
but even then Annie's fair, aristocratic type of blonde prettiness had
been definite where Alice's was vague, and Annie's expression had been
just a trifle haughty and discontented where Alice's was always grave
and sweet. Annie had almost been a beauty, she was extremely and
conspicuously good-looking even now, when as Mrs. Hendrick von Behrens,
wife of a son of an old and wealthy Knickerbocker family, s