would be thinking of her
now, as she thought of him. Or would he have gone to sleep, secure in
her half promise? Did he really love her?

The desire to be loved! There was coming to Sidney a time when love
would mean, not receiving, but giving--the divine fire instead of the
pale flame of youth. At last she slept.

A night breeze came through the windows and spread coolness through
the little house. The ailanthus tree waved in the moonlight and sent
sprawling shadows over the wall of K. Le Moyne's bedroom. In the yard
the leaves of the morning-glory vines quivered as if under the touch of
a friendly hand.

K. Le Moyne slept diagonally in his bed, being very long. In sleep the
lines were smoothed out of his face. He looked like a tired, overgrown
boy. And while he slept the ground-squirrel ravaged the pockets of his
shabby coat.

CHAPTER II

Sidney could not remember when her Aunt Harriet had not sat at the
table. It was one of her earliest disillusionments to learn that Aunt
Harriet lived with them, not because she wished to, but because Sidney's
father had borrowed her small patrimony and she was "boarding it out."
Eighteen years she had "boarded it out." Sidney had been born and grown
to girlhood; the dreamer father had gone to his grave, with valuable
patents lost for lack of money to renew them--gone with his faith in
himself destroyed, but with his faith in the world undiminished: for he
left his wife and daughter without a dollar of life insurance.

Harriet Kennedy had voiced her own view of the matter, the after the
funeral, to one of the neighbors:--

"He left no insurance. Why should he bother? He left me."

To the little widow, her sister, she had been no less bitter, and more
explicit.

"It looks to me, Anna," she said, "as if by borrowing everything I had
George had bought me, body and soul, for the rest of my natural life.
I'll stay now until Sidney is able to take hold. Then I'm going to live
my own life. It will be a little late, but the Kennedys live a long
time."

The day of Harriet's leaving had seemed far away to Anna Page. Sidney
was still her baby, a pretty, rather leggy girl, in her first year
at the High School, prone to saunter home with three or four
knickerbockered boys in her train, reading "The Duchess" stealthily, and
begging for longer dresses. She had given up her dolls, but she still
made clothes for them out of scraps from Harriet's sewing-room. In the
parlance of