o words passed on the
subject, she felt that visiting was to be discouraged and the power to
invite was vested in Simeon alone. Respect was the keynote of her
attitude in regard to him, and he made little effort to bridge the
chasm of years between them.

He was a tall, spare man, slightly stooped, with a prominent forehead,
insignificant nose, and eyes red and strained through too ardent a use
of the microscope. He habitually wore gold-rimmed spectacles; indeed,
he put them on in the morning before he tied his cravat, and took them
off at the corresponding moment of undressing at night. His mouth was
his best feature, for, while the lips were pinched, they had a kind of
cold refinement.

He was a just man but close, and the stipend he gave his wife for
their monthly expenses barely kept them in comfort, but Deena had been
brought up in the school of adversity, and had few personal needs. Her
house absorbed all her interest, as well as stray pennies. The old
mahogany furniture was polished till it shone; the Ponsonby silver tea
set looked as bright as if no battering years lay between it and its
maker's hand a century ago; the curtains were always clean; the
flowers seemed to grow by magic--and Deena still parted her wonderful
bronze hair and kept it sleek.

At the end of two years, when she was twenty-two, a ripple of
excitement came into her life; another Shelton girl married, and
caused even greater relief to her family than had Deena, for she
married a Boston man with money. He had been a student at Harmouth and
had fallen in love with Polly Shelton's violet eyes and strange
red-gold hair, that seemed the only gold fate had bestowed upon the
Sheltons. He took Polly to Boston, where, as young Mrs. Benjamin
Minthrop, she became the belle of the season, and almost a
professional beauty, though she couldn't hold a candle to Deena--Deena
whose adornment was "a meek and quiet spirit," who obeyed Simeon with
the subjection St. Peter recommended--whose conversation was "chaste
coupled with fear."

But one day all this admirable monotony came to an end quite
adventitiously, and events came treading on each other's heels. It was
a crisp October day, and an automobile ran tooting and snorting, and
trailing its vile smells, through Harmouth till it stopped at
Professor Ponsonby's gate and a lady got out and ran up the courtyard
path. Deena had been trying in vain to make quince jelly
stiffen--_jell_ was the word used in t