vous, active figure that struck deep down into a past which Sabine, with the passing of years, had almost succeeded in forgetting; and now it all came back again, sharply and with a kind of stabbing pain, so that she had a sudden odd feeling of having become a little girl again . . . plain, red-haired, freckled and timid, who stood in terror of Aunt Cassie and was always being pulled here and there by a thousand aunts and uncles and cousins because she would not be turned into their idea of what a nice little girl ought to be. It was as if the whole past were concentrated in the black figure of the old lady who had been the ring-leader, the viceroy, of all a far-flung tribe, an old woman who had been old even twenty years earlier, lying always on a sofa under a shawl, issuing her edicts, pouring out her ample sympathies, her bitter criticisms. And here she was, approaching briskly, as if the death of Mr. Struthers had somehow released her from bonds which had chafed for too long.
Watching her, one incident after another flashed through the quick, hard brain of Sabine, all recreated with a swift, astounding clarity—the day when she had run off to escape into the world and been found by old John Pentland hiding in the thicket of white birches happily eating blueberries. (She could see his countenance now, stern with its disapproval of such wild behavior, but softening, too, at the sight of the grubby, freckled plain face stained with blueberry juice.) And the return of the captive, when she was surrounded by aunts who dressed her in a clean frock and forced her to sit in the funereal spare bedroom with a New Testament on her knees until she "felt that she could come out and behave like a nice, well-brought-up little girl." She could see the aunts pulling and fussing at her and saying, "What a shame she didn't take after her mother in looks!" and, "She'll have a hard time with such plain, straight red hair."
And there was, too, the memory of that day when Anson
