woman who has grown old
unwillingly, and still hopes, against reason, that youth is not a matter
of a few years at the wrong end of life. Her hair was fashionably
arranged, but she was attired in a worn black silk, her only ornament a
hair brooch. Her hands were small and well kept, although the skin hung
loose upon them, spotted with the moth-patches of age. Her figure was
erect, but stout.

"What is it, brother?" she asked softly, addressing the back of the
autocrat's head.

He wheeled about sharply.

"Why do you always come in like a cat? Do you think those people will
come to-day? It's raining cats and dogs."

"Certainly; they always come, and they have their carriages--"

"That's just it. They're getting so damned high-toned that they'll soon
feel independent of me. But I'll turn them out, bag and baggage."

"They treat you exactly as they have treated you for thirty years and
more, brother."

"Do you think so? Do you think they'll come to-day?"

"I am sure they will, Hiram."

He looked her up and down, then said, with a startling note of
tenderness in his ill-used voice:

"You ought to have a new frock, Marian. That is looking old."

Had not Dr. Webster been wholly deficient in humor he would have smiled
at his sister's expression of terrified surprise. She ran forward and
laid her hand on his shoulder.

"Hiram," she said, "are you--you do not look well to-day."

"Oh, I am well enough," he replied, shaking her off. "But I have noticed
of late that you and Abigail are looking shabby, and I don't choose that
all these fine folks shall criticise you." He opened his desk and
counted out four double-eagles.

"Will this be enough? I don't know anything about women's things."

Miss Webster was thankful to get any money without days of
expostulation, and assured him that it was sufficient. She left the room
at once and sought her companion, Miss Williams.

The companion was sitting on the edge of the bed in her small ascetic
chamber, staring, like Dr. Webster down-stairs, through the trees at the
rain. So she had sat the night of her arrival at Webster Hall, then a
girl of eighteen and dreams. So she had sat many times, feeling youth
slip by her, lifting her bitter protest against the monotony and
starvation of her existence, yet too timid and ignorant to start forth
in search of life. It was her birthday, this gloomy Sunday. She was
forty-two. She was revolving a problem--a problem she had revolved ma