onsolation that Nyoda could give
her in the days that followed. Full of bitterness as her cup was, there
was to be added yet one more drop--the drop that caused it to run over.
Aunt Phoebe came to live with her and be the mistress of the Bradford
house. At some time in the past Judge Bradford and his sister Phoebe had
been named joint guardians of Hinpoha, but the Judge was now dead and
Aunt Phoebe was the sole guardian. Aunt Phoebe was a spinster of the
type usually described in books, tall and spare, with steely blue eyes.
She was sixty years old, but she might have been a hundred and sixty,
for all the sympathy she had with youth. She had been disappointed in
love when she was twenty and had never thought kindly of any man since.
From her earliest childhood Hinpoha had dreaded the very name of Aunt
Phoebe. When she came to visit a restraint fell over the whole house.
The usual lively chatter at the dinner table was hushed, and Aunt Phoebe
held forth in solemn tones, generally berating some unfortunate person
who nearly always happened to be a good friend of Mrs. Bradford's.
Hinpoha would be called up for a minute examination of her clothes and
manners and would invariably do something which was not right in her
great aunt's eyes.

She had a vivid recollection of going tobogganing down the long front
walk one winter day, her jolly mother on the sled with her, steering it
adroitly around the corner and up the sidewalk for a distance after
leaving the slope. Such fun they were having that they did not look to
see if the road was clear, and went bumping into a female figure that
was coming majestically along the street, knocking her off her feet and
into a snowdrift. It was Aunt Phoebe, coming to make a formal afternoon
call. She sat bolt upright in the snow and adjusted her lorgnette to see
if by any chance her grandniece could be one of those rowdy children.
When she discovered that it was not only Hinpoha, but her mother as
well, frolicking so indecorously, she was speechless. Mrs. Bradford
started to make an abject apology, but the sight of Aunt Phoebe sitting
in the snowdrift with her lorgnette was too much for her and she went
off into a peal of laughter, in which Hinpoha joined gleefully. It was
weeks before Aunt Phoebe could be coaxed to make another visit. And this
was the woman who was coming to take the place of Hinpoha's beloved
mother!

Aunt Grace left the day she came. There was not enough room in one hous