on and tolerance of her fellows.

From her father, who had been for thirty years the arbiter of affairs
both great and small in a country parish and had yet succeeded in
retaining the undivided affection of his flock, she had inherited a spice
of humorous philosophy, and this, combined with a very practical sense of
justice, enabled her to accept human nature as she found it--without
contempt, without censoriousness, and sometimes with a breathless
admiration for its unexpectedly heroic qualities.

She it was who alone had some slight understanding of Nan Davenant's
complexities--complexities of temperament which both baffled the
unfortunate possessor of them and hopelessly misled the world at large.

The Davenant history showed a line of men and women gifted beyond the
average, the artistic bias paramount, and the interpolation of a
Frenchwoman four generations ago, in the person of Nan's
great-grandmother, had only added to the temperamental burden of the
race. She had been a strange, brilliant creature, with about her that
mysterious touch of genius which by its destined suffering buys
forgiveness for its destined sins.

And in Nan the soul of her French ancestress lived anew. The charm of
the frail and fair Angele de Varincourt--baffling, elusive, but
irresistible--was hers, and the soul of the artist, with its restless
imagination, its craving for the beautiful, its sensitive response to all
emotion--this, too, was her inheritance.

To Penelope, Nan's ultimate unfolding was a matter of absorbing interest.
Her own small triumphs as a singer paled into insignificance beside the
riot of her visions for Nan's future. Nevertheless, she was sometimes
conscious of an undercurrent of foreboding. Something was lacking. Had
the gods, giving so much, withheld the two best gifts of all--Success and
Happiness?

While Penelope mused in the firelight, the clatter of china issuing from
the kitchen premises indicated unusual domestic activity on Nan's part,
and finally culminated in her entry into the sitting-room, bearing a
laden tea-tray.

"Hot scones!" she announced joyfully. "I've made a burnt offering of
myself, toasting them."

Penelope smiled.

"What an infant you are, Nan," she returned. "I sometimes wonder if
you'll ever grow up?"

"I hope not"--with great promptitude. "I detest extremely grown-up
people. But what are you brooding over so darkly? Cease those
philosophical reflections in which you've