centre, even as his father and his mother had been in their family-circle, in their circle of children and even grandchildren. . . . Slowly, slowly it had happened, year by year, really almost unnoticeably, that all the brothers and sisters who had been one family in the white palace over there—which in that garden yonder, so very far away in miles and years, seemed to him part of the fairy-tale of his boyhood, with Constance' fairy figure flitting through it, red flowers at her temples—that all the brothers and sisters had drawn a circle round about themselves, a circle of their families or of themselves alone; and, though those circles for the first few years had sometimes intersected one another, slowly, slowly they had shifted farther and farther apart; and, just as that gloomy twilight drew nigh, they retreated still farther. . . . Had Mamma always secretly foreseen it; and was that why she had clung so obstinately to that one evening a week, the evening at which formerly he had laughed and joked with the others: always that Sunday evening of Mamma's, the "family group," that gathering at regular intervals, with cards and cakes, which they all sometimes thought extremely boring, but never neglected, for the sake of the old mother, who wished to keep the children together? Had Mamma always foreseen it? Oh, it still existed, the family-group, with the cards and cakes, every Sunday; but was it not really losing its significance more and
