sidelong, furtive glances; and Sabine, knowing her so well, saw that the old woman had been given a violent shock. She had come prepared to find a broken, unhappy Sabine and she had found instead this smooth, rather hard and self-contained woman, superbly dressed and poised, from the burnished red hair (that straight red hair the aunts had once thought so hopeless) to the lizard-skin slippers—a woman who had obviously taken hold of life with a firm hand and subdued it, who was in a way complete.
"Your dear uncle never forgot you for a moment, Sabine, in all the years you were away. He died, leaving me to watch over you." And again the easy tears welled up.
("Oh," thought Sabine, "you don't catch me that way. You won't put me back where I once was. You won't even have a chance to meddle in my life.")
Aloud she said, "It's a pity I've always been so far away."
"But I've thought of you, my dear. . . . I've thought of you. Scarcely a night passes when I don't say to myself before going to sleep, 'There is poor Sabine out in the world, turning her back on all of us who love her.'" She sighed abysmally. "I have thought of you, dear. I've prayed for you in the long nights when I have never closed an eye."
And Sabine, talking on half-mechanically, discovered slowly that, in spite of everything, she was no longer afraid of Aunt Cassie. She was no longer a shy, frightened, plain little girl; she even began to sense a challenge, a combat which filled her with a faint sense of warmth. She kept thinking, "She really hasn't changed at all. She still wants to reach out and take possession of me and my life. She's like an octopus reaching out and seizing each member of the family, arranging everything." And she saw Aunt Cassie now, after so many years, in a new light. It seemed to her that there was something glittering and hard and a little sinister beneath all the sighing and tears and easy sympathy. Perhaps she (Sa-
