riend, whom
she regarded with loving tolerance of superiority, though she had
been the daughter of a former clergyman of the town, and had wedded
another, and might presumably have been accounted herself of a
somewhat higher estate. The gentle and dependent clergyman's widow,
when she came back to her native city after the death of her
husband, found herself all at once in a pleasant little valley of
humiliation at the feet of her old friend, and was contented to
abide there. "Perhaps your son's sister-in-law will marry and go
away," she said, consolingly, to Mrs. Zelotes, who indeed lived in
that hope. But Eva remained at her sister's, and, though she had
admirers in plenty, did not marry, and the dissension grew.

It was an odd thing that, however the sisters quarrelled, the minute
Andrew tried to take sides with his wife and assail Eva in his turn,
Fanny turned and defended her. "I am not going to desert all the
sister I have got in the world," she said. "If you want me to leave,
say so, and I will go, but I shall never turn Eva out of doors. I
would rather go with her and work in the shop." Then the next
moment the wrangle would recommence, and the harsh trebles of wrath
would swell high. Andrew could not appreciate this savageness of
race loyalty in the face of anger and dissension, and his brain
reeled with the apparent inconsistency of the thing.

"Sometimes I think they are both crazy," he used to tell his mother,
who sympathized with him after a covertly triumphant fashion. She
never said, "I told you so," but the thought was evident on her
face, and her son saw it there.

However, he said not a word against his wife, except by implication.
Though she and her sister were making his home unbearable, he still
loved her, and, even if he did not, he had something of his mother's
pride.

However, at last, when Ellen was almost eight years old, matters
came suddenly to a climax one evening in November. The two sisters
were having a fiercer dispute than usual. Eva was taking her sister
to task for cutting over a dress of hers for Ellen, Fanny claiming
that she had given her permission to do so, and Eva denying it. The
child sat listening in her little chair with a look of dawning
intelligence of wrath and wicked temper in her face, because she was
herself in a manner the cause of the dissension. Suddenly Andrew
Brewster, with a fiery outburst of inconsequent masculine wrath with
the whole situation, essayed to