anything like your mother?”

Kate nodded. But even as she nodded, she saw the difference suddenly. Aunt Katherine was taller, of course; but that was not it. Her firm, squarish chin was not neutralized by melting gray eyes as Katherine’s was. Aunt Katherine’s eyes were dark and their expression echoed the strong chin; it was a sure expression, penetrating and above all intellectual. And the lines about the mouth and eyes were lines that Katherine would never have at any age. They were lines of loneliness and trouble.

Even as Kate was thinking all this—lightning-quick thinking it was, of course—she saw the lines deepen and the mouth and eyes harden perceptibly. “It is past dinner time. Didn’t Elsie come down with you?” The hardening was not for Kate’s tardiness; it was for Elsie’s.

“I haven’t seen her. I don’t believe she was in her room or she would have heard me.”

“Haven’t seen Elsie? That is strange! She must be in the orchard or somewhere, and not realize the time.”

Aunt Katherine moved to the garden door, her hand still on Kate’s shoulder. “There she comes now, from the orchard.”

They stepped over the sill and waited for Elsie on the stone flags outside. She was floating through the gardens directly from the orchard. Floating is a better word for it than hurrying because she was such a light and airy creature and above all so graceful. Her approach was almost in the nature of a dance. She was dressed in white, a narrow belt of periwinkle blue at the low waistline.

It was evident when she came nearer that she had not seen the two waiting for her. Her eyes were dropped a little and she was smiling! There was a radiance of happiness about her. At first, in this impression of her, happiness was even more obvious than prettiness. But she was pretty, too, quite enchantingly pretty. Kate, who was not pretty herself, loved it all the more in others. Her appreciation always leapt to meet it.

Elsie was slim, with a fairy grace of face and figure. Her hair, a net of sunlight even now in the growing dusk, was tied at her neck, and its curls straying on her shoulders and at her cheeks shone like fairy gold. Her face was delicately moulded and faintly tinted. It was her chin that struck Kate most. It was an elfin, whimsically pointed chin. In fact, she was such an exquisite creature that Kate, standing there waiting for the instant when she should look up and their eyes meet, felt as 

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