from Aunt Katherine. All that he would allow her to do to help his financial situation was to buy the house from him in which they were living so that with the money he might pay his debts. Thereafter he insisted that she was his landlady and he made a fetish until the month of his death of being on time with the absurdly small rent.

Aunt Katherine had built herself a large and mansionlike house on part of the land that went with her brother’s little house. And since he distinctly limited her in the things she might do for his daughter, she adopted, suddenly and to every one’s amazement, a poor young boy, with no background whatever, who had been brought up in a “Home,” and who at the time of her discovering him was working in a factory. She prepared him herself for college, sent him to Harvard, and thrust him, almost head first, into the “younger set” in Oakdale. He had married Gloria, a beautiful young Bostonian but with no especial “connections.” That was all that Kate knew of him, except for this late knowledge that he had a daughter.

Kate could understand her grandfather’s pride, dimly. But her mother’s case was not so clear to her, not quite. Her mother had married a rising young diplomat, a man of supposedly some wealth and assuredly fine ancestry. But on his death, not long after Kate’s birth, it was discovered that there was not a cent to which the young widowed mother could lay claim. Katherine had never explained to Kate how this had happened. She hardly knew herself perhaps, because the processes of Wall Street were a maze to her. Almost gleefully, Aunt Katherine had seized upon this opportunity to offer her niece a home with her and a substantial allowance so that she might feel independent in that home. Katherine had refused point blank. And Aunt Katherine, now very sensitive on the subject of rejected generosities, had made a clean break with her namesake, washed her hands, and dropped her out of her life, much as one might drop a thistle that had pricked too unreasonably.

Katherine, determined to earn her own and her little daughter’s way, had obtained an instructorship here at Ashland College, worked hard and happily ever since, and gloried in her independence.

The whole reason for this choice of poverty and hard work Katherine had not told Kate. But she had hinted that there was a very deep reason and one that justified her. Sometime, perhaps, she would disclose it. Meanwhile, Kate gave all this little thought, and was only brooding over it now because of the letter in her hand.

After a minute she 

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