l probability it would
soon pass into the hands of strangers, troubled her. She had often sat
here in Patricia's Arbor, beside old Thomas Gilpin, and listened to his
reminiscences. She had been a favorite with the old man, all of the
tenderness of whose nature had spent itself upon the wife who lived only a
brief time; and in Celia's relationship to her, distant though it was, lay
the secret of his regard.

One of her earliest recollections was of taking tea at the Gilpin house in
company with Genevieve and Allan Whittredge. Mild, fair-faced Miss Anne
and her grim-visaged, cross-grained brother were a strangely assorted
pair. Celia's childish soul had been filled with awe on these occasions.
She had difficulty in keeping her seat in the stiff old haircloth chairs,
or in crossing the polished floor of the drawing-room without slipping.

At one end of this room stood the ancient spinet, long ago the property of
her own great-grandmother, which she was told would some day be hers.
Celia had been proud of this until Miss Anne, displaying her chief
treasures, Patricia's miniature and ring, remarked upon Genevieve's
likeness to her great-aunt. Genevieve, with the ring on her finger,
looked complacently over her shoulder at the long mirror, and Celia was
smitten with sudden envy. A great-grandmother called Saint Cecilia was not
half so interesting as a beautiful great-aunt with a romantic love story;
and an old and useless spinet not to be compared to a ring like
Patricia's. That the ring was to be Genevieve's she never doubted.

Allan had made fun of his sister and treated heirlooms in general with
scorn, calling Celia to look at a print of Jonah in knee breeches and shoe
buckles, emerging front the mouth of the whale. Allan always saw the fun
in things.

Between those days and the present there was a great gulf fixed. She had
resolutely put away from her all these memories, and to-day she was
annoyed that they should return in such force. They brought only pain to
her tired heart.

Her hands fell in her lap, and she gazed with unseeing eyes at the hills.
After all, Patricia, mourning her lover, had not known the bitterest
sorrow.

The thought of her work, which must be done, aroused her. "What a weak
creature I am, thinking my lot harder than that of any one else," she
exclaimed, and taking up her needle she determinedly fixed her mind on the
present. There was the suit Tom needed, and the grocery bill that should
be