ecture matter,
for instance?"

"Some of it matters very little indeed," concurred his sister blandly.

This stirred him to an ungracious laugh. "As for keeping up only human
ties, isn't a fortnight once every five years rather slim rations?"

"Ah, there are difficulties--the Masonic Building--" murmured Aunt
Victoria, apparently at random. But then, it seemed to Sylvia that
they were always speaking at random. For all she could see, neither of
them ever answered what the other had said.

The best times were when she and Aunt Victoria were all alone
together--or with only the silent, swift-fingered, Pauline in
attendance during the wonderful processes of dressing or undressing
her mistress. These occasions seemed to please Aunt Victoria best
also. She showed herself then so winning and gracious and altogether
magical to the little girl that Sylvia forgot the uncomfortableness
which always happened when her aunt and her father were together. As
they came to be on more intimate terms, Sylvia was told a great many
details about Aunt Victoria's present and past life, in the form of
stories, especially about that early part of it which had been spent
with her brother. Mrs. Marshall-Smith took pains to talk to Sylvia
about her father as he had been when he was a brilliant dashing youth
in Paris at school, or as the acknowledged social leader of his class
in the famous Eastern college. "You see, Sylvia," she explained,
"having no father or mother or any near relatives, we saw more of
each other than a good many brothers and sisters do. We had nobody
else--except old Cousin Ellen, who kept house for us in the summers
in Lydford and traveled around with us," Lydford was another topic on
which, although it was already very familiar to her from her mother's
reminiscences of her childhood in Vermont, Aunt Victoria shed much
light for Sylvia. Aunt Victoria's Lydford was so different from
Mother's, it seemed scarcely possible they could be the same place.
Mother's talk was all about the mountains, the sunny upland pastures,
rocky and steep, such a contrast to the rich, level stretches of
country about La Chance; about the excursions through these slopes
of the mountains every afternoon, accompanied by a marvelously
intelligent collie dog, who helped find the cows; about the orchard
full of old trees more climbable than any others which have grown
since the world began; about the attic full of drying popcorn and
old hair-trunks an