ty daughter, and to his
conversion from the Congregational to the Episcopal Church.

Isabel, of course, was a conspicuous member of the ancient aristocracy,
by virtue of her forefathers having owned half the county when the smoke
still rose from the wigwam; and although Mrs. James Otis had maintained
a haughty aloofness on her husband's ranch in summer, and later in a
Rosewater cottage, her neighbors thought none the less of her for that,
and Isabel, after school hours, played with their children. Later, even
the transgressions of her father, and her unchaperoned trip to Europe,
left her position secure. An Otis was an Otis. _Noblesse oblige._
Aristocracies are aristocracies the world over.

Mrs. Tom saw Isabel coming and opened the door herself; then as lunch
would not be ready for an hour, led her up to her large sunny bedroom,
where her three children, pretty fragile creatures in spite of their
tan, sweet-fed and spoiled, were playing on the floor. Isabel tossed and
kissed them, presenting them with a box of toys she had bought in Main
Street. Then she sat down with Anabel in the window to have a long talk.
But she quickly discovered that Anabel talked with one wing of her
brain, so to speak, and her roving gaze beamed constantly at the noisy
brood on the floor. Complacency, maternity, happiness, radiated from all
her sweet womanly little person, but in half an hour Isabel was casting
about for an excuse to leave directly after luncheon, although she had
promised to spend the day. As Anabel babbled on, while embroidering a
little frock, relating anecdotes of her marvellous children, commenting
upon the increasing extortions of the labor class, the iniquities of
servants, the mounting of prices in California, and the shocking mania
for cards that possessed Rosewater in common with the rest of the world,
there stole over Isabel a feeling of intolerable ennui. She had felt it
often enough in her sister's uneven domestic atmosphere, and now and
again in more regulated interiors, but never had the wings of her spirit
beaten so furiously as in this happy home of the most beloved of her
friends. The wave ebbed when the nurse came and carried off the
protesting trio, and as she sat with Anabel in the beautiful little
dining-room panelled and furnished with redwood, highly polished, the
table set with silver and crystal, the dainty meal beyond criticism and
served by a noiseless Chinaman, she was able to feel grateful that
A