only desirable in comparison with them, and because it was the flowering—such as it was—of a plant exotic and costly: a magenta rag of a flower that stood for much money, and for nothing else!

The baby went on with the parable—pretty as he had made it, grotesqued now by her. “An’ Aunt Carline’s anover flower, too. She’s a daleeah.”

Bransby laughed. Caroline Leavitt was rather like a dahlia; neat, geometrically regular, handsome, cut and built by rule, fashionable, prim but gorgeous, as far from poetry and sentiment as anything a flower could be.

Mrs. Leavitt was his widowed cousin and housekeeper—called “Aunt” by the children. Richard and Violet had been the only children of John and Cora Bransby.

Violet, several years younger than Richard, had married six years earlier—married a human oddity, half-genius, half-adventurer, impecunious, improvident, vain. He had misused and broken her. His death was literally the only kindness he had ever done her—and it had killed her—for weak-womanlike she had loved him to the end. Perhaps such weakness is a finer, truer strength—weighed in God’s scales—than man-called strength.

Violet Pryde, dying five years after Alice’s death, left two children; the boys playing with six-year-old Helen under the oak trees. Bransby had been blind to his sister’s needs while Pryde had lived; but indeed she had hidden them with the silence, the dignity and the deft, quiet subterfuge of such natures—but at her husband’s death Bransby had hastened to ask, as gently as he could (and to the women he loved he could be gentleness itself), “How are you off? What do you need? What would you like best? What may I do?” pressing himself to her as suitor rather than almoner. But she had refused all but friendship, indeed almost had refused it, since it had never been given her dead. Her loyalty survived Pryde’s disloyal life, and even dwarfed and stunted her mother-instinct to do her utmost for her boys: her boys and Pryde’s. But her own death had followed close upon her husband’s, and then Richard Branbsy had asserted himself. He had gathered up into his own capable hands the shabby threads of her affairs—mismanaged for years, but—even so—too scant to be tangled, and the charge of her two orphaned boys.

He had brought Stephen and Hugh at once to Deep Dale and had established them there on an almost perfect parity with Helen—a parity impinged by little else than her advantage of sex and charm and presumable heirship.

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