ind the big brass andirons, while all the windows and doors were wide
open. But through cold and heat, and burning high or low, the fire was
never entirely forgotten, never quite permitted to go out. Thus ever
alight it burned like a sacred flame on the altar of home.

Streaming from the doors and windows that night, it gave the youth and
the maiden a cheerful welcome as they came up the darkening hillside.
Lamplight also began to glimmer, and candles flitted here and there
before the windows and door, borne by the dark shapes of the servants
who were laying the table for supper. The main room of Cedar House
opened directly upon the river front; and when brightly lighted, it
could be distinctly seen from without. Ruth and David paused on the
threshold, still unconsciously holding one another's hands, and looked
in.

There were five persons in the room, three men and two women, and they
were all members of the household with the exception of Philip Alston,
the white-haired gentleman, whose appearance bore no other mark of age.
And he also might have been considered as one of the family, since he
had been coming to the house daily for many years. He came usually to
see Ruth, but of late he had found it necessary to see William Pressley
more often; and they were talking eagerly and in a low tone, rather
apart, when the boy and girl paused to see and hear what was taking
place within the great room. William Pressley sat in the easiest chair
in the warmest corner, close to the hearth. There are some men--and a
few women--who always take the softest seat in the best place, and they
do it so naturally that no one ever thinks of their doing anything else
or expects them to sit elsewhere. William Pressley was one of these
persons. In the next easiest chair, on the other side of the hearth, was
his aunt, the widow Broadnax, whose short, broad, shapeless, inert
figure was lying rather than sitting almost buried in a heap of
cushions. This lady was the sister of the judge and the half-sister of
the other lady, Miss Penelope Knox,--the thin, nervous, restless little
old woman,--who was fidgeting back and forth between the hearth and the
doorway leading to the distant kitchen. The relationship of these two
ladies to one another, and the difference in their relationship to the
head of Cedar House, caused much dissension in the household, and gave
rise to certain domestic complications which always rose when least
expected.

The fir