hrown the
night-latch for him. "I don't mean to be."

"I don't think anything of you that I ought not to think: in that I am as
conscientious as even you could wish. Good-by, until this evening. I'll
meet you all at the station."

As had come to be the regular order of things, Elinor found herself under
fire when she went above stairs to rejoin her mother and sister.

Mrs. Brentwood was not indifferent to the Ormsby millions; neither had she
forgotten a certain sentimental summer at the foot of Old Croydon. She was
a thin-lipped little person, plain-spoken to the verge of unfriendliness;
a woman in whom the rugged, self-reliant, Puritan strain had become
panic-acidulous. And when the Puritan stock degenerates in that direction,
it is apt to lack good judgment on the business side, and also the
passivity which smooths the way for incompetence in less assertive folk.

Kent had stood something in awe, not especially of her personality, but of
her tongue; and had been forced to acquiesce silently in Loring's
summing-up of Elinor's mother as a woman who had taken culture and the
humanizing amenities of the broader life much as the granite of her native
hills takes polish--reluctantly, and without prejudice to its inner
granular structure.

"Elinor, you ought to be ashamed to keep Brookes Ormsby dangling the way
you do," was her comment when Elinor came back. "You are your father's
daughters, both of you: there isn't a drop of the Grimkie blood in either
of you, I do believe."

Elinor was sufficiently her father's daughter to hold her peace under her
mother's reproaches: also, there was enough of the Grimkie blood in her
veins to stiffen her in opposition when the need arose. So she said
nothing.

"Since your Uncle Ichabod made such a desperate mess of that copper
business in Montana, we have all been next door to poverty, and you know
it," the mother went on, irritated by Elinor's silence. "I don't care so
much for myself: your father and I began with nothing, and I can go back
to nothing, if necessary. But you can't, and neither can Penelope; you'd
both starve. I should like to know what Brookes Ormsby has done that you
can't tolerate him."

"It isn't anything he has done, or failed to do," said Elinor, wearily.
"Please let's not go over it all again, mother."

Mrs. Brentwood let that gun cool while she fired another.

"I suppose he came to say good-by: what is he going to do with himself
this winter?"

The te