bones, a matter in which of late there had been too much indifference.

Nancy luxuriated in her renewed proprietorship of the old house, her
home, and the home of her family even before the British officers seized
it for their quarters in 1812. There was a hole to this day in the white
pine panelling above the fireplace in the dining room, which, tradition
held, had been made by a British bullet discharged after a discussion of
the family port. She had found something depressing in the rococo
civilization of Southern California. There was an insufficient
appreciation of Mr. Square's Eternal Fitness of Things. The spirit of
Los Angeles, for example, was the same as that of the picnic party
which, lunching on Ruskin's glacier, leaves its chicken bones and
eggshells to offend all subsequent picnickers. At Woodbridge people did
not make public messes of themselves. If they picnicked on a glacier
they did up their eggshells in a neat package, which, in default of a
handy bottomless pit, they took home with them and put in their garbage
pails. That's the way nice people behaved, and what on earth was there
to be gained by behaving otherwise?

So Nancy was glad to be home and see again the family things she had
grown up with and loved. She was glad to see Henry, who appeared in his
turn glad to see her; but her feelings upon being restored to her nephew
were much deeper than either. Harry mattered more to her than anyone
else in the world. Her mother, who had died five years ago, when Nancy
was twenty, had been particularly devoted to him; and this would have
been sufficient reason in itself for commending him to her tenderest
care.

Such was the family that would have met the casual eye of a stranger: a
young professor in extremely comfortable circumstances, with a brilliant
future and an enviable son, living in a fine old house administered by a
younger sister, the favourite daughter of the town. Beneath the surface,
however, and unknown except to a few, was a conflict of wills that only
an exterior made up of strong family pride and respect for the
established order could have withstood.

On the evening of the day on which Mrs. Robert Lee-Satterlee--the
grandeur of whose name was never reduced by the omission of a single
syllable--asked Nancy to go to California, Nancy had talked it over with
Henry.

"It would be nice to go, for I haven't really been away since Mother
died. I confess I'd like it, but she's not coming b