consciousness.

When she turned to him, he was surprised to see that she looked
astonishingly happy, almost as if she had been struggling with joy,
instead of pain.

"This chair," she said, sinking into it, "makes me feel at home."

Naturally he could not understand.

"Because," she explained, "I once thought I was going to live in it.
It has been reupholstered, but I should know it if I met in anywhere in
the world!"

"How very odd!" exclaimed Eugene, staring.

"I settled here in pioneer days," she went on, tapping the arms lightly
with her finger-tips. "It was the last dance I went to in Canaan."

"I fear the town was very provincial at that time," he returned, having
completely forgotten the occasion she mentioned, therefore wishing to
shift the subject. "I fear you may still find it so. There is not
much here that one is in sympathy with, intellectually--few people
really of the world."

"Few people, I suppose you mean," she said, softly, with a look that
went deep enough into his eyes, "few people who really understand one?"

Eugene had seated himself on the sill of an open window close by.
"There has been," he answered, with the ghost of a sigh, "no one."

She turned her head slightly away from him, apparently occupied with a
loose thread in her sleeve. There were no loose threads; it was an old
habit of hers which she retained. "I suppose," she murmured, in a
voice as low as his had been, "that a man of your sort might find
Canaan rather lonely and sad."

"It HAS been!" Whereupon she made him a laughing little bow.

"You are sure you complain of Canaan?"

"Yes!" he exclaimed. "You don't know what it is to live here--"

"I think I do. I lived here seventeen years."

"Oh yes," he began to object, "as a child, but--"

"Have you any recollection," she interrupted, "of the day before your
brother ran away? Of coming home for vacation--I think it was your
first year in college--and intervening between your brother and me in a
snow-fight?"

For a moment he was genuinely perplexed; then his face cleared.
"Certainly," he said: "I found him bullying you and gave him a good
punishing for it."

"Is that all you remember?"

"Yes," he replied, honestly. "Wasn't that all?"

"Quite!" she smiled, her eyes half closed. "Except that I went home
immediately afterward."

"Naturally," said Eugene. "My step-brother wasn't very much chevalier
sans peur et sans reproche! Ah, I should like to polish u