night she was dressed in a very fancy gown covered with lace and sequins and passementerie, rather in the mode which some one had told her was her style in the far-off days of her girlhood. Her hair was streaked with gray and cut short in a shaggy, uneven fashion; not, however, because short hair was chic, but because she had cut it ten years before short hair had been heard of, in a sudden futile gesture of freedom at the terrible moment she made her one feeble attempt to escape Aunt Cassie and lead her own life. She had come back in the end, when her poor savings gave out and bankruptcy faced her, to be received by Aunt Cassie with dignified sighs and flutters as a returned and repentant prodigal. In this rôle she had lived ever since in a state of complete subjection. She was Aunt Cassie's creature now, to go where Aunt Cassie ordered, to do as she was bid, to be an ear-piece when there was at hand no one more worthy of address.
At the sight of Sabine's green dress and red hair moving through the big hall below them, Aunt Cassie said, with a gleam in her eye: "Sabine seems to be worried about her daughter. The poor child doesn't seem to be having a success, but I suppose it's no wonder. The poor thing is very plain. I suppose she got the sallow skin from her father. He was part Greek and French. . . . Sabine was never popular as a young girl herself."
And she fell to speculating for the hundredth time on the little-known circumstances of Sabine's unhappy marriage and divorce, turning the morsels over and over again with a variety of speculation and the interjection of much pious phraseology; for in Aunt Cassie's speech God seemed to have a hand in everything. He had a way of delivering trials and blessings indiscriminately, and so in the end became responsible for everything.
Indeed, she grew a bit spiteful about Sabine, for there was in the back of her mind the memory of an encounter, a day
