color anywhere immediately about her was a
fluffy wool afghan of a heaven-like shade of deep blue spread across
the lower part of her helpless body.

Miss Asenath loved all that had color: the gold of sunlight across the
sitting-room floor; the green of the grass and the waxen-leaved coral
honeysuckle just outside the sitting-room windows; she even loved the
wax flowers because they were so gay. But Miss Letitia loved just as
dearly to dress her all in white to match her hair and skin (Miss
Letitia was the seamstress for the whole family); so there was a
compromise. Miss Asenath wore the soft white gowns of Miss Letitia's
making and, with Miss Letitia's own connivance, indulged her fancy for
colors in her afghans, which she had in every conceivable shade.

Long ago, Miss Asenath had had a Romance.

She had always been the acknowledged beauty of the family in her
Dresden china loveliness, and she had been little more than a child
when love had come to her in all the wonder and ecstacy of loving that
belongs to youth. But a fall from her riding horse had left her pinned
to this couch, never to walk again, so she had sent her boy-lover away.

And although she had known him grow old and had watched him live a full
life apart from hers (a life actually ended only a very few years ago),
she had seemed to see him always as the boy belonging to her girlhood,
to those months she had claimed him as her own. She wore his picture in
a locket at her throat hung on a piece of ribbon the color of the
afghan for that day. It was a miniature of a smiling boy with waving
blonde hair brushed high above his forehead in an unmistakable roll,
with eyes of a very deep shade of blue, and dressed in a high stock and
much be-ruffled shirt, and a blue coat adorned with brass buttons.

Arethusa dearly loved all of this, the Romance and the Locket. She made
it her special bit in the dressing of Miss Asenath every morning to
hang the locket on its bit of ribbon and tie the tiny bow around Miss
Asenath's frail neck.

She often wondered just how it would seem when one was old to have been
the Heroine of a Situation exactly like a story book. She pictured it
as a dramatic scene of renunciation between the lovers, both
satisfyingly well-favored--for Miss Asenath's beauty was a tradition
and the boy in the locket was undeniably good to look upon--; and her
natural inclination to romance was aided by the reading of many
old-fashioned novels of unbr