y come and talk to you, and
spin their nets about you; and at home it is so dreary and lonely, and
your heart is so empty and Father is so mean, you haven't got anybody
else in the world to talk to." Such was her defence, effective even if
more voluble than coherent.

They walked on. They were passing through a valley in the forest. On
either side were tall pine trees, the crowns of which were lighted by
the evening sun.

"You can't play with Fate, Dorothea," said Daniel. "It does not permit
smudging or muddling, if we are to stand the test. It keeps a faultless
ledger; the entries it makes on both sides are the embodiment of
accuracy. Debts that we contract must always be paid, somehow,
somewhere."

Dorothea felt that he was getting started; that the great, good story
was about to come. She stopped, spread her shawl on the ground, and took
a graceful position on it, all eyes and ears. Daniel threw himself on
the moss beside her.

And he told his story--into the moss where little insects were creeping
around. He never raised either his eye or his voice. At times Dorothea
had to bend over to hear him.

He told about Gertrude, her torpor, her awakening, her love, her
resignation. He told about Eleanore; told how he had loved her without
knowing it. He told how Eleanore, out of an excess of passion and
suffering, became his, how Gertrude wandered about dazed, unhappy, lost,
until she finally took her life: "Then we went up to the attic, and
found it on fire and her lifeless body hanging from the rafter."

He told how Gertrude had lived on as a shadow by the side of Eleanore,
and how Eleanore became a flower girl, and how Philippina the
inexplicable, and still inexplicable, had come into his family, and how
Gertrude's child lived there like an unfed foundling, and how the other
child, the child he had had by the maid, had found such a warm spot in
his heart.

He told of his meeting the two sisters, their speaking and their
remaining silent, his seeing them in secret trysts, the moving about
from house to house and room to room, the singing of songs, his
experiences with the Doermaul opera company, the light thrown on his
drab life by a mask, his friend and the help he had received from him,
his separation from him, the brush-maker's house on St. James's Place,
the three queer old maids in the Long Row, the days he spent at Castle
Erfft, the old father of the two sisters and his strange doings--all of
this he descr