to
lay the entire matter before her sister-in-law--that was what she
would do immediately!

She sprang to her feet and ran lightly up-stairs; but, fast as she
fled, thought outran her slender flying feet, and she came at last
very leisurely into Celia's room, a subdued, demure opportunist,
apparently with nothing on her mind and conscience,

"If I may have the carriage at ten, Celia, I'll begin on the
Destitute Children to-morrow. . . . Poor babies! . . . If they
only had once a week as wholesome food as is wasted in this city
every day by Irish servants . . . which reminds me--I suppose you
will have to invite your new kinsman to dine with you."

"There is loads of time for that, Honey-bud," said her
sister-in-law, glancing up absently from the note she was writing.

"I was merely wondering whether it was necessary at all," observed
Ailsa Paige, without interest.

But Celia had begun to write again. "I'll ask him," she said in
her softly preoccupied voice, "Saturday, I think."

"Oh, but I'm invited to the Cortlandt's," began Ailsa, and caught
her under lip in her teeth. Then she turned and walked noiselessly
into her bedroom, and sat down on the bed and looked at the wall.

CHAPTER IV

It was almost mid-April; and still the silvery-green tassels on the
wistaria showed no hint of the blue petals folded within; but the
maples' leafless symmetry was already veined with fire. Faint
perfume from Long Island woodlands, wandering puffs of wind from
salt meadows freshened the city streets; St. Felix Street boasted a
lilac bush in leaf; Oxford Street was gay with hyacinths and a
winter-battered butterfly; and in Fort Greene Place the grassy
door-yards were exquisite with crocus bloom. Peace, good-will, and
spring on earth; but in men's souls a silence as of winter.

To Northland folk the unclosing buds of April brought no awakening;
lethargy fettered all, arresting vigour, sapping desire. An
immense inertia chained progress in its tracks, while overhead the
gray storm-wrack fled away,--misty, monstrous, gale-driven before
the coming hurricane.

Still, for the Northland, there remained now little of the keener
suspense since those first fiery outbursts in the South; but all
through the winter the dull pain throbbed in silence as star after
star dropped from the old galaxy and fell flashing into the new.

And it was a time of apathy, acquiescence, stupefied incredulity; a
time of dull faith in destin