pense in his family. But you won't see your
ingratitude if I stand here and talk till doomsday; so I'm going back
to my children. If you come to your senses, you can ride out with
Boyce Bains to-morrow afternoon. Good-by, and I'm sure I hope you
won't regret this all your life."

Julia walked to the door with her sister, and stood watching her
sadly while she climbed into her smart little Ford and skillfully
steered it out of the yard and down the road. The very set of her
shoulders as she sailed away toward home was disapproving.

With a sigh of relief Julia Cloud shut the door and went back to her
window and the dreary landscape. It was time for a sunset, but the sky
was leaden. There Would be nothing but grayness to look at, grayness
in front of her, grayness behind in the dim, silent room. It was like
her life, her long, gray life, behind and ahead. All her life she had
had to serve, and see others happy. First as a child, the oldest
child. There had been the other children, three brothers and Ellen.
She had brought them all up, as it were, for the mother had always
been delicate and ailing. She had washed their faces, kissed their
bruises, and taken them to school. She had watched their love-affairs
and sent them out into the world one by one. Two of the brothers had
come home to die, and she had nursed them through long months. The
third brother married a wealthy girl in California, and never came
home again except on flying visits. He was dead now, too, killed in
action in France during the first year of the Great War. Then her
father had been thrown from his horse and killed; and she had borne
the burden for her mother, settled up the estate, and made both ends
meet somehow, taking upon herself the burden of the mother, now a
chronic invalid. From time to time her young nieces and nephews had
been thrust upon her to care for in some home stress, and always she
had done her duty by them all through long days of mischief and long
nights of illness. She had done it cheerfully and patiently, and had
never complained even to herself. Always there had been so much to be
done that there had been no time to think how the years were going by,
her youth passing from her forever without even a glimpse of the
rose-color that she supposed was meant to come into every life for at
least a little while.

She hadn't realized it fully, she had been so busy. But now, with the
last service over, an empty house about her, an empt