thank God."

"Persis," Joel remonstrated in shocked accents, "it's not becoming for
a single woman to say things like that. Wanting children, indeed. If
you weren't my sister I shouldn't know what to make of such talk."

She leaned toward him, her hands on her knees. Her gray eyes, warmed
almost to blue by joy and tenderness, were steely as she faced him.

"Joel, you don't take it into account that the Almighty didn't make old
maids. He made us just women, and the hunger for children is nothing
more to be ashamed of than the longing for food and drink. I'm not
accusing Him either, when I say that life isn't fair to a lot of us.
It hangs other people's burdens on our backs, and they weigh us down
till we haven't the strength to take what is rightfully ours. These
children had ought to be mine. My blood ought to be in their veins.
It's too late for that, but it's not too late for everything. What
would Aunt Persis Ann's money be worth to me if all it meant was that I
could fix up the house and leave off making dresses for other folks and
travel around and see the world? It's done more than that. It's made
up to me for being cheated out of my rights. It's made me a woman at
last."

Up-stairs sounded a fretful wail, a sharp little note, piercing the
quiet evening with its suggestion of discomfort or alarm. In an
instant Persis was on her feet. Again her face was luminous. Suffused
with a transforming tenderness, it lost its stern lines and became
radiantly youthful. Blue misty shadows veiled the steely light of her
eyes.

"The baby's crying," she said, and left him swiftly. And Joel, with a
bewildered sense of enlightenment carried to the point of dazzling
effulgence, clapped both hands over his throbbing head.

"Well," he gasped, "I'll be jiggered! Looks like you can live in the
same house with a woman from the time she's born till she's gray-headed
and not know her any better than if you'd met her once at a
Sunday-school picnic. To think of Persis with all those feelings
bottled up inside her for the last twenty years. As the immortal
Shakespeare says,

"'Who is't can read a woman?'"

CHAPTER XVI

WHERE ANGELS FEAR TO TREAD

The morning following the heterogeneous accession to the Dale family,
Joel did not leave his bed. Whether his disability was in part or
altogether due to a desire to open his sister's eyes to the result of
her lack of consideration, Joel himself could not have