Reesha," Tweet went on, "living like that he at his eternal lecturing, never going a place with her." Tweet's lip made a deprecatory indrawn sound at the corner. "Reesha 's had a funny life." She rehearsed the funny life: "No better than a widow. No better than a maiden lady."

"But he is handsome," mama conceded. "Not as handsome as your father." Again the eyebrow's pensive arch upon the sainted Crumb.

"Perhaps you can make something of Barnaby, Cousin Leda," said Tweet. "You like funny folks."

"Not always," Leda told her, dryly, and chided herself for her secret interpretation; hugged it, too. She had been listening as if listening were the positive, the vital; and it was as if the talk of the Crumbs were the negative, the inert, the dead.

They all went into the study, mama hunched, as if she had recently been cut from rumpled paper, Tweet with rhythmic thigh and breast, her pompadour poised like a parrakeet's.

The mellow room received them among the paler colors of fire, the wine, the maroon, the blue.

Tweet roamed there.

"Mama," she said, "is n't this a refined room?"

& 3

Leda smelled the odor of home, an odor like clean woolen. The hall clock, with incredible solemnity, uttered a wrong hour. Her father in his study below tapped the fender with the tongs. The memory of the Crumbs was in the room like a gas. She thought, "Every day and night for a year," and in the dark she divined in her home a kind of dying. "Every day and night for a year"; yet within

the month nothing of all this remained.

A dropping away of her father after a fortnight of illness, a comfortable illness during which he had continued to plan; then the head-lines said that he was no more. "John Perrin Is No More." The words carried nothing of the essence of the event. He was no more.

Three days before his death a letter came concerning the sweeping away of all in his preposterous, unadvised risk. Leda said nothing, laid the letter aside, sat with him in his high-ceiled

room.

"Crete we must see Crete by moonlight, Leda."

"Crete. By moonlight—”

"There 'll be something to feel such as we 've felt only in books. Something very jolly."

"Oh, yes-jolly."

"And Thessaly. Driving round in something, driving slowly,-it must be slowly, with a volume of Theocritus. Leda, look out my red Theocritus and put it with my things."

"Your things?"

"I've some shirts ready in the window-seat."

She found a pile of under-things and a dozen volumes, ready. She brought the Theocritus.

He died with the perfection of his dream unimpaired; he died believing her well and able and that he had cleverly provided for her. There was an instant when he knew that he was dying. His murmured "You 'll be all right" lifted that last banner.

A brother clergyman said, "Lean hard-lean hard on the Saviour, Perrin." And Perrin answered proudly, "My daughter will never want," and died. Thirty years of spiritual leadership, and he clean and strong; but his

period had done this for him that he crossed the valley or the river or what ever the topographical unit may be paternally telling ghostly guineas for Leda.

Her grief was intolerably sharpened by her hurt at his thwarting. Three parts of the dark of death seemed to her to be frustration. Besides her grief and the torturing pain in her arm, that which she most clearly remembered of the time was the smell of the badly cured leather of the funeral taxi and the sickening swinging of its window tassel.

When all had been discharged, it was found that Perrin had left his daughter, Prospect told it, without a penny. Without a penny and unable to work for a year. Leda said this over; it sounded like a representation by one who is trying to make matters out worse than they are.

She packed her belongings. She had no plan. There were Cornish kinsmen, but she remembered them as intent, throaty folk who did not understand her idioms and who confused her with their vowels. In any case, it was impossible to appeal to them. To appeal to friends was unimaginable. Leda stored the manse furniture, said that she was not certain what she should do.

From the first Prospect had assumed a solution which to her had not presented itself: her cousins, the Crumbs.

The Crumbs did not count themselves with the Starrets or the Lanes of Prospect. That is to say, either a Starret or a Lane might have been pallbearer to a Crumb, but a Crumb pallbearer to a Starret or a Lane, never.

At noon dinner in the fortnight following the death of John Perrin,

Tweet was late. It was assumed that she was at the parsonage, and Mrs. Truman Crumb hoped that Berta would have a good dinner. Tweet had n't eaten much breakfast. Had n't Orrin noticed that? That was funny, but, then, men never noticed anything. Had n't Orrin noticed that men never notice anything?

"I've noticed it," said Grandfather Crumb. He was eating at the end of the table, and he now lifted his head and looked about at everybody, but nobody looked at him.

"Don't forget your dried corn, Grandfather," said Mrs. Crumb and looked at the corn.

"Tweet 's a busy little bee," said Orrin. "She 'll swoop down presently to browse," untroubled by the image of a browsing bee.

"Tweet eats too much, anyhow. She 's fat," said Pearl. Pearl was there, overripe sweetness, a lovely, listless sister, a too mellow fruit.

"Fat!" Mrs. Crumb indignantly turned upon her youngest. "How can you say so? Her figure is very much what mine was her age."

Pearl's lips repeated "Too fat" without a sound.

"Let's not get to jangling over that," Orrin cried. He was so pinkly shaved, looked out with such evident pupils, that you simply could not shatter his expectation.

"Jangling!" Mrs. Crumb did quote the word, reproachfully. “What a word, Orrin!"

"Is n't it!" said Pearl, resentfully. "Danged fine word!" said Grandfather Crumb, loudly, and laughed at his plate.

"Eat up your dried corn, Grandfather," said Mrs. Crumb.

Tweet came in.

"There's my little woman!" cried Orrin, as in I-spy.

By obscure processes Mrs. Truman Crumb's welcome to her daughter was blemished by indignation. She said:

"Well! Where have you been staying till after it came time for them to get their dinner?"

Tweet was hurried, hungry, and began:

“I can't say that I was conscious-" She was of those who in irritation resort to Latin derivatives. Also, at such times she gave to her vowels their full breadth.

"Upon my word, jangling the first thing!" cried Orrin. Waiting for the maid Nettie to bring in dessert, he sang a loud bar. It was so that he took the situation by the throat and throttled it to decorum.

Shortly Tweet became more affable; digestion augmenting her breeding, she said:

"I've something to tell you," and let them guess, her lips close pressed, one dimple stationary, and she saying, "No, no, no," inflected up. At last it came: “I think I 've found her." She told them about an orphan of Prospect, seven, homeless, curls. "Can't you see her going ahead of us up the aisle, Orrin? Orrin, what do you think?"

His Tweet leaned back in her chair, as pretty a piece of thoughtfulness as ever was poised by a word. They should have to see.

At supper Orrin came home with the news that Leda had n't a penny. Prospect said so, and Prospect knew about her right arm. "They say "

Grandfather Crumb was polishing a quarter on his knee. His iron-gray hair curled about his neck; his splendid nose stooped to his task. He spoke out in his loud voice, without looking up:

"Instead of that orphing, why don't you ask the girl to come and bide here?"

Out of the depths of the heart of Mrs. Truman Crumb her voice spoke:

"Ho! Leda would n't come here. We 're not good enough for her."

"Mama! the idea!" Tweet's pride was trampled. "I'd like to know if we don't go with the nicest folks in Prospect.”

There it was.

The Gideonite spoke out:

"Don't jangle. And it is n't a question of the orphan, I should hope. If the girl has n't got a home, that settles it, does n't it? We'll ask her to come here." He was unaware of the faintest nobility, as if his words were the casual secretion of a certain

"Ah," said the Gideonite, "I'm afraid-" Tweet's eyebrows con

fessed a like fear.

"That I sympathize with this to an unwise extent." Tweet relaxed, and lifted bright reassured eyes.

"But," Orrin went on, and once more his wife dangled her reaction, "we shall have to see," he judicially concluded.

unconsciously partook. He added, "But for Lord's sakes! stop your jangling!" and left the room. This prejudice against "jangling" seemed more consciously noble, a recent and a Gideonitish thing.

The three women stared at one another: Leda there!

"It always seems as if she saw right straight through you," Tweet said feebly." I declare, I don't know—"

"She's a good girl," he said positively. "She's better than our tribe." He rose with difficulty and precision, balanced, walked. "She looks like " "Like grandma did," Mrs. Crumb affirmed.

"No," said Grandfather Crumb.

It was to be seen that there had been a tremendous life going on in him, too.

Leda had accepted, had arrived, her aversion to using the Crumbs absorbed by her aversion to borrowing with no plan to repay. She slept as one dead, awakened to bewilderment, found herself still assailed by the events of the previous evening: her arrival, the articulateness of the Crumbs, who had even seized upon her bodily in authentic impulses of tenderness which had assumed her responsive tear, had been blankly taken aback when it did not flow. Cry, Cousin Leda! cry your heart out! We'll understand.

She was, on this first morning, the first to reach the dining-room save for the maid Nettie, who smiled as if she knew that she ought not, being the maid, and vanished.

"They're mostly late," she did volunteer, speaking with the extreme fervor peculiar to apprentices. It was not a parenthetical impulse in her. She had no faculty for murmurs.

A gigantic red poinsettia was hung as a shade against the central lamp. This monstrous blossom stared at Leda an unrestrained expression of the inexpressible. It was like the eye of the house.

The Crumbs entered, relaxed, as if in them the night were not yet spent, the three women first, in little sacks.

"Well," said Tweet, "going downtown early are you, Cousin Leda?" Leda said no, that she was not going down-town.

"Please don't feel you have to put on all that for us!" Tweet cried at Leda's trim skirt and blouse.

"No, my dear," said Mrs. Truman Crumb, "you'll find us very easygoing. We wear and let wear in the mornings."

"That makes me think," said Tweet. "I dreamed-"

It was a longish dream and ramified. It was interrupted by the arrival of the Gideonite. He, too, gave no good morning, but the sheer breeziness of his manner made of his entrance a little ceremony.

"My stars!" he said as he took his place. He was all animal well-being, attacked Pearl, accused her of having by her plate a love-letter, winked, demanded: "Who is he this time? Duke Envers again?" And was a happy boy.

Tweet said:

"Honey, do you really have to go in the morning?" And he told her fondly that she always asked that every time he started on his trip. And their eyes clung in a vital tenderness that left an observer shaken.

Now he felt that something was due the cousin, so he turned upon her, dropped his voice, his manner, dipped his head. Was she making herself at home? Well, she just must.

They all joined him. Cousin Leda, you will feel you 're one of us? And blood is thicker than water.

Leda sat there, her look going from one to another. She felt shorn of all

her tentacles. Horns-horns were required.

"You must n't think of me," she said earnestly, and they said, well, they should hope they would think of her. The scarlet eye of the poinsettia was like a fifth Crumb, insisting.

The latch of the porch-door clicked, and there was Grandfather Crumb. No one gave him attention, and he leaned in the doorway, fumbling in his pockets. He was clean, collarless, shaven; his gray hair rolled thickly about his ears. He came down the room and laid by Leda's plate an apple. With her thanks she smiled up at him, but he did not look at her. No one else said anything to him. He went to the kitchen, still fumbling in his pocket. You knew that nothing was there, that this was his way of preserving his dignity—the dignity of having preoccupations of his own.

"He never eats breakfast," Mrs. Truman Crumb explained before the door closed; "he keeps apples in his room."

"He won't like giving up his room," Tweet observed. She gave a bright look, as if she had touched a button and something might whir. Something did whir.

"Why should he give up his room?" Orrin demanded.

"For Barnaby. Grandfather can go in the trunk-room."

"My grandfather," said Orrin, "shall do nothing of the sort."

"But you know when they were coming that other time when they did n't come that Reesha wrote particularly for Barnaby to have the attic room, where it's quiet, with a fireplace." "If your sister's husband thinks he's going to upset our whole household so he can have quiet, he 's fooled."

"But, Orrin-" Tweet began feebly. "Enough!" shouted the Gideonite. Leda found herself trembling; said: "Please! Let some one have the room you 've given me. I should do quite well in the trunk-room—”

"You'll stay where you are," said Orrin. "I'm not going to have things turned upside down for that man.

"I don't know what Barnaby will say." Tweet feebly kept it up.

"Since when are you more tender of him than of me?"

"Orrin, how absurd! They're our guests-"

"They invited themselves."

"Orrin! It's my sister." Now a note of tears.

"It's my grandfather, that old man. Grandfather," he called, and went toward the pantry-door.

Grandfather reappeared. He was eating an apple, which he continued to examine.

"Grandfather," said the Gideonite, "you'll keep your room, understand? Nobody is to put you out of it."

Grandfather Crumb chewed leisurely and swallowed.

"I brought m' things down when the despatch come. I brought 'em down

to the trunk-room."

"You'll take them back to-day."
"No."

"You move back to your own room to-day."

Grandfather Crumb took an enormous bite from his apple, breaking the bite with a cracking sound.

"I'll stay where I am," he said mildly. "You try to boss me, and I'll have you across my knee," and left the room.

Pearl laughed abominably. Tweet's lip moved, but her eyes were anxious. All depended on the Gideonite. If he,