“Oh, come, Aunt Flora—the poor little thing! Why should she be a religious if she doesn’t want to? After all, she’s your sister’s child and your own Sylvia’s cousin—give her a chance!” David pleaded, good-naturedly.

Flora looked at him temperately, patiently.

“But of course I shall give her a chance, David!” she said, quietly. “She will unquestionably have some plan for herself. I shall see that it is helped, if it is reasonable. But in the old days,” Flora added, “she was treated exactly as a child of the house. She must not expect that now. There have been changes since[11] then, David. Poor Tom’s loss, Roger’s death—poor Mamma’s death——”

[11]

She was silent. David, staring thoughtfully into the fire, was silent, too. The strangely repressive influence of the twilight, the old room, the cold, reminiscent voice that somehow rang of the tomb, the autumn winds beginning to whine softly about the old house, and beyond and above and through all sounds the quiet steady suck and rising rush of the sea, the scream of little pebbles beneath the shrill fine crying of gulls in the dusk, had taken possession of his spirit again. Something mysterious, unhappy about it all—something especially so about Flora—was oppressing him once more.

But why? David asked himself, angrily. Here was a widowed woman, living in an old house only a few miles from the very heart of civilization, contented with her solitude, yet counting the hours until her idolized daughter’s return to Wastewater for the summer months; conscientious in the discharge of her duty where Gabrielle, her sister’s motherless little girl, was concerned, spending her days peacefully among servants and flowers, books and memories.

Many and many another elderly woman lived so. What was there so strangely disturbing, so almost menacing about this one? He did not know. He told himself impatiently now that it was only because she was his kinswoman that she had power to make him so uneasy; this was, in short, the disadvantage of knowing her so well.

“The girls will brighten you up!” he remarked, hopefully.

[12]“Perhaps,” his aunt answered, forbiddingly. And again there was silence, and presently Mrs. Fleming went away, with some murmur of dinner.

[12]

Left alone, David glanced about the familiar room, whose every detail had been just as 

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