rd that Harry
was to come home, it had been at first more than she could bear. She
had burst into wild incoherent protests; she had prayed that an
accident might happen to him and that he might never reach home. And
then the Trojan pride and restraint had come to her aid. She was
ashamed, bewildered, that she could have sunk to such depths; she
prepared to meet him calmly and quietly; she even hoped that, perhaps,
he might be so changed that she would welcome him. And, after all, he
would in a little time be head of the House. Robin, too, was strongly
under her influence, and it was unlikely that he would leave her for a
man whom he had never known, for whom he could not possibly care.

It was this older claim of hers with regard to Robin that did, she
felt, so obviously strengthen her position, and now that Harry had
really returned, she thought that her fears need not trouble her much
longer--he did all the things that Robin disliked most. His
boisterousness, heartiness, and good-fellowship, dislike of everyday
conventionality, would all, she knew, count against him with Robin.
She had seen him shrink on several occasions, and each time she had
been triumphantly glad. For she was frightened, terribly frightened.
Harry was threatening to take from her the one great thing around which
her life was centred; if he robbed her of Robin he robbed her of
everything, and she must fight to keep him. That it would come to a
duel between them she had long foreseen, she had governed for so long
that she would not easily yield her place now; but she had not known
that she would feel as she did about Robin, she had not known that she
would be jealous--jealous of every look and word and motion. She had
never known what jealousy was before, but now in the silence of the
golden, sunlit room, with only the twittering of the birds on the lawn
to disturb her thoughts, she faced the facts honestly without
shrinking, and she knew that she hated her brother. Oh! why couldn't
he go back again to his sheep-shearing! Why had he come to disturb
them! It was not his environment, it was not his life at all! She
felt that they could never lead again that same quiet, ordered
existence; like a gale of wind he had burst their doors and broken
their windows, and now the house was open, desolate, to the world.

She went up to her father's room, as was her custom every morning after
breakfast. He was lying at his open window, watching, wit