ief was in her hand once more. "A
rose and a smile! that's all we could give it," she said; "and we
would either of us share some of that burden if we only could." She
watched the merry, healthy children playing beside them, and added,
"After all let us comfort ourselves that brown cheeks and fat legs are
in the majority. Rightness somehow or other must be at the root of
things, or we shouldn't be a living world at all."

"Amen," said Lavendar, "but the sight of suffering innocents like
that, sometimes makes me wish I were dead."

"Dead!" she echoed. "Why, it makes me wish for a hundred lives, a
hundred hearts and hands to feel with and help with."

"Ah, some women are made that way. My stepmother, the only mother I've
known, was like that," Lavendar went on, dropping suddenly again into
personal talk, as they had done before. He and she, it seemed, could
not keep barriers between them very long; every hour they spent
together brought them more strangely into knowledge of each other's
past.

"She was a fine woman," he went on, "with a certain comfortable
breadth about her, of mind and body; and those large, warm, capable
hands that seem so fitted to lift burdens."

Lavendar was in an absent-minded mood, and never much given to noting
details at any time. He bent over on the low wall in retrospective
silence, looking at the blue sea before them.

Robinette, who was perched beside him, spread her two small hands on
her white serge knees and regarded them fixedly for a moment.

"I wonder if it's a matter of size," she said after a moment. "I
wonder! Let's be confidential. When I was a little girl we were not at
all well-to-do, and my hands were very busy. My father's success came
to him only two or three years before his death, when his reputation
began to grow and his plans for great public buildings began to be
accepted, so I was my mother's helper. We had but one servant, and I
learned to make beds, to dust, to wipe dishes, to make tea and coffee,
and to cook simple dishes. If Admiral de Tracy's sister had to work,
Admiral de Tracy's niece was certainly going to help! Later on came my
father's illness and death. We had plenty of servants then, but my
hands had learned to be busy. I gave him his medicines, I changed his
pillows, I opened his letters and answered such of them as were within
my powers, I fanned him, I stroked his aching head. The end came, and
mother and I had hardly begun to take hold of life agai