xcitement. There was a
smooth, graceful strength in her every movement that was almost
animal-like; she suggested the idea of a big cat as she alternately
released the girl and then returned, in a half-circle, to take renewed
possession of her. "A miracle!" she repeated.

"Indeed, it almost needed that to bring me to myself," said the girl,
gravely. "But now I see things clearly; it seems almost as though the
mother herself had stood beside me and drawn the veil away. It was Ugo,
though, who really did it," she added, and laughed again softly.

"Ugo!" echoed the other, indignantly. "And, if you please, where is the
fellow? The candles have not been lighted, the fire is dying out, and
not a sign of supper visible. It is unbearable, Esmay, and he shall pack
this very night."

"But Nanna!"

"I won't listen to a word."

"You will. He has gone already."

She pushed the elder woman into a chair. "Now don't dare to move until I
am back with wood and a light. Not a word, sister mine--if you love me."
Taken by surprise, Nanna let her go, and sat waiting.

The girl returned in a few minutes with a basket containing several
lumps of sea-coal.

"This is a thousand times better than Ugo's boards and barrel-staves,"
said Esmay, triumphantly, and transferred the fuel to the hearth, where
it presently burst into a cheerful flame. "There are three or four boxes
of the stuff in the cellar, enough to last us all winter. Now for the
lamp."

On the mantel-piece stood a shallow dish containing a small quantity of
cotton-seed oil and a piece of lampwick. Esmay took down the vessel and
inspected it with a calculating eye. "It will last until bedtime," she
announced, and lit it with a spill of paper.

Nanna looked at her half-sister questioningly, but did not offer to
speak. She had never seen Esmay just like this, and the change was
especially noticeable after the silence and apathy of the past months.
Her thoughts travelled back to the human link that had united them for
so long--the woman whom each had called mother, although to Nanna it had
been only a step-relationship. How impossible it had once seemed that
there could be any new adjustment of life's machinery; how difficult the
realization that nature is accustomed to settle these matters in her own
time and way, and invariably does so! Yet here was Esmay suddenly
returned to herself, moving about, alert and eager, knitting her brows
over the one important problem of the mom