t it made a concave frame for her
stern, elderly face and thin shoulders. "Rose," said she, "you had
better go into the house and lay down till dinner-time. You have been
walking in the sun, and it is warm, and you look tired."

She spoke at once affectionately and severely. It seemed almost
inconceivable that this elderly country woman could speak in such
wise to the city-bred girl in her fashionable attire, with her air of
self-possession.

But the girl looked up at her as if she loved her, and answered, in
just the way in which Sylvia liked her to answer, with a sort of
pretty, childish petulance, defiant, yet yielding. "I am not in the
least tired," said she, "and it did not hurt me to walk in the sun,
and I like to sit here under the trees."

Rose was charming that morning. Her thick, fair hair was rolled back
from her temples, which had at once something noble and childlike
about them. Her face was as clear as a cameo. She was dressed in
mourning for her aunt, but her black robe was thin and the fine
curves of her shoulders and arms were revealed, and the black lace of
her wide hat threw her fairness into relief like a setting of onyx.

"You had better go into the house," said Sylvia, her eyes stern, her
mouth smiling. A maternal instinct which dominated her had awakened
suddenly in the older woman's heart. She adored the girl to such an
extent that the adoration fairly pained her. Rose herself might
easily have found this exacting affection, this constant
watchfulness, irritating, but she found it sweet. She could scarcely
remember her mother, but the memory had always been as one of lost
love. Now she seemed to have found it again. She fairly coquetted
with this older woman who loved her, and whom she loved, with that
charming coquettishness sometimes seen in a daughter towards her
mother. She presumed upon this affection which she felt to be so
staple. She affronted Sylvia with a delicious sense of her own power
over her and an underlying affection, which had in it the protective
instinct of youth which dovetailed with the protective instinct of
age.

It had been planned that she was to return to New York immediately
after Miss Farrel's funeral. In fact, her ticket had been bought and
her trunk packed, when a telegram arrived rather late at night. Rose
had gone to bed when Sylvia brought it up to her room. "Don't be
scared," she said, holding the yellow envelope behind her. Rose
stared at her, round-eyed