ternoon curled up in a ball, her soft red dress,
her soft red cheeks, her soft red lips vivid bits of colour in the
lamplight. She had read through the twilight, until the lamps came to
help her pretty eyes, and like a scholar of old over some problem she
bent above her fairy tale. The volume was unwieldy, and she supported it
on her knees. Close to her side a little boy of six watched the absorbed
face, watched the lamp and the shadows of the lamp on the pink walls of
the room; watched his mother as she sat sewing, but most devotedly of
all he watched through his half-dreaming lids his sister as she read her
story. His sister charmed him very much and terrified him not a little;
she was so quick, so strong, so alive--she rushed him so. He loved his
sister, she was his illustrated library of fairy tales and wonderful
plays, she was his companion, his ruler, his dominator, and his best
friend.

"Bella," he whispered at the second when she turned the page and he
thought he might venture to interrupt, "Bella, _wouldn't_ you read it to
me?"

The absorbed child made an impatient gesture, bent her head lower and
snuggled down into her feast. She shook her mane of hair.

"Gardiner," his mother noticed the appeal, "when will you learn to read
for yourself? You are a big boy."

"Oh, I'm not so vewy big," his tone was indolent, "I'm not so big as
Bella. You said yesterday that you bought me five-year-old clothes."

In the distance, above the noise of the wind, came the tinkle of the
car-bell. Gardiner silently wished, as he heard the not unmusical sound,
that the eternal, ugly little cars, with the overworked horses, could
be turned into fairy chariots and this one, as it came ringing and
tinkling along, would stop at the front door and fetch.... A loud ring
at the front door made the little boy spring up.

His sister frowned and glanced up from her book. "It isn't father!" she
flashed out at him. "He's got his key. You needn't look scared yet,
Gardiner. It is a bundle or a beggar or something or other stupid. Don't
disturb."

However, the three of them listened, and in another second the door of
the sitting-room was opened by a servant and, behind the maid, on the
bare wood floor of the stairs, there fell a heavy step and a light step,
a light step and a heavy step. Bella never forgot the first time she
heard those footfalls.

The lady at the table put her sewing down, and at that moment, behind
the servant, a young ma