; if we complained that we had
to keep our own rooms in order and sweep the parlors besides, a
dignified reference was made to the former number of servants in the
establishment; and when we roundly declared that life wasn't worth
living without a dessert for dinner every day, somebody would say that
it could hardly be expected we should set such a table as we did before
the war. Positively, we didn't know how old we were, for Aunt Nanny
declared that her memory wasn't a yard long on account of the trouble
she had had during the war, and the family Bible had been "confiscated"
by a pious private of taking propensities. Lilly was the older, however:
we knew that. She was half a head taller than I, and had a dignified
figure, though she looked like a child in the face and had a good many
child's ways. She never knew what to do with her hands, for one thing,
and when a little embarrassed she had a sweet cunning habit of putting
one hand up to her mouth and laughing behind it. Her mouth was her
prettiest feature. It had a bewitching way of dimpling at the corners,
and the twenty-four pearls behind it had never been touched by the
dentist. This, Aunt Nanny said, was the one good result of the war; for
we had to eat boiled rice and drink cold water instead of plum-cake and
coffee; so we kept our teeth sound.

We were orphans. Our names were Lilly and Stella Tresvant. Our father
had been killed during the war, and our mother had died of grief. We
were little children then, and had been sent to the Island City,
Galveston, to live with Aunt Nanny and Uncle David. We thought ourselves
quite grown-up now. Since we came to our island home we had never been
away from it. It was forlorn enough, though it was a pretty place, all
overgrown with oleanders and cape-jessamines. We used to get so tired
watching the sea, hearing the restless beat, beat of the waves against
the shore, and seeing the far-off birds dip their wings into the water!
There was an old book in Uncle David's library that I suppose we had
read a dozen times. It was called _Rasselas_, and was about a young
prince and his sister who lived in a Happy Valley, and yet could never
be happy until they got away. "I can sympathize with them," Lilly used
to say with such a mournful look in her big gray eyes; "and yet what was
their case compared to ours? They didn't have to wear their
grandmother's clothes made over, I'm very sure."

But the turning came in our long lane. One