eticent
girl, whose function was apparently limited to seeing her aunt provided
with a shawl, or her uncle with a cigar, at the right opportunities. If
he thought of her at all, it was as of the living spirit of the
furniture. The tables and chairs became animate in her, and articulate;
but her claim to recognition had never gone beyond the necessity for a
hand-shake or a smile. When he did take her hand--on arriving, or on
coming down-stairs in the morning--he received an impression of
something soft and slim and tender; but the moment of pleasure was
always too fleeting for conscious registration. Similarly, when, from a
polite instinct to include her in the conversation, he smiled vaguely in
her direction, he received a look gentle and beaming and almost
apologetic in return; but it was never more to him than if the dimly
lustrous surfaces of Mrs. Bland's nice Sheraton had suddenly become
responsive. She made no demand; and he offered no more than she asked.

Perhaps the fact that the girl was not really the niece of either Mr. or
Mrs. Bland had something to do with his tendency to treat her as a
negligible quantity. Mrs. Bland had explained the situation to him
during his first visit to Mountain Brook.

"Lily isn't our niece at all," she had said, in a tone which seemed to
reproach Lily with an inadvertance. "She's no relation to us whatever.
We don't know who she is. She doesn't even know herself. Since you
insist," she continued, as though Chip had been pressing for
information, "we got her out of an orphanage, the year we built this
house. Mr. Bland seemed to think the house ought to have something young
in it; and so--"

"You might have had a dog," Chip said, dryly.

"You needn't laugh. It wasn't _my_ desire to adopt a child. I simply
yielded to Mr. Bland, as I do in everything. The only stipulation I made
was that she should call us uncle and aunt. I couldn't bear to be called
mother by a child who wasn't my own; but Mr. Bland is so odd that he
wouldn't have cared. I dare say you've noticed how odd he is."

Chip could see that Bland might be odd from his wife's point of view. He
was the self-made man who had shed the traces of self-making. Mrs. Bland
was fond of describing herself as a self-made woman; but the stages of
the process by which she had "turned herself out" were visible. She
would have been disappointed had it not been so. Having confessed from
youth upward that her ambition was "to make the mo