eturned Virginia with a laugh. "Harry does,
anyhow."

"I believe Harry is your darling, Jinny."

"I try not to make any difference in my feeling--they are all the best
children that ever lived--but--Susan, I wouldn't breathe this to anybody
on earth but you--I can't help thinking that Harry loves me more than
the others do. He--he has so much more patience with me. The girls
sometimes laugh at me because I am old-fashioned and behind the times,
and I can see that it annoys them because I am ignorant of things which
they seem to have been born knowing."

"But it was for their sake that you let yourself go--you gave up
everything else for them from the minute that they were born."

A tear shone in Virginia's eye, and Susan knew, without having it put
into words, that a wound somewhere in that gentle heart was still
hurting. "I'd like to slap them!" she thought fiercely, and then she
said aloud with a manner of cheerful conviction:

"You are a great deal too good for them, Jinny, and some day they will
know it."

A longing came over her to take the thin little figure in her arms and
shake back into her something of the sparkle and the radiance of her
girlhood. Why did beauty fade? Why did youth grow middle-aged? Above
all, why did love and sacrifice so often work their own punishment?

CHAPTER II

THE PRICE OF COMFORT

Virginia knelt on the cushioned seat in the bay-window of her bedroom,
gazing expectantly down on the pavement below. It was her forty-fifth
birthday, and she was impatiently waiting for Harry, who was coming home
for a few days before going abroad to finish his studies at Oxford. The
house was a new, impeccably modern dwelling, produced by a triumph of
the utilitarian genius of the first decade of the twentieth century, and
Oliver had bought it at a prodigious price a few years after his
dramatic success had lifted him from poverty into comfort. The girls,
charmed to have made the momentous passage into Sycamore Street, were
delighted with the space and elegance of their new home, but Virginia
had always felt somehow as if she were visiting. The drawing-room, and
especially the butler's pantry, awed her. She had not dared to wash
those august shelves with soda, nor to fasten her favourite strips of
white oilcloth along their shining surfaces. The old joy of "fixing up"
her storeroom had been wrested from her by the supercilious mulatto
butler, who wore immaculate shirt fronts, but whom sh