food, all carefully rendered extra palatable in order that they
may put upon their bodies the burden of throwing off an enormous amount
of superfluous food. A hundred years from now people will be as ashamed
of us for our piggishness as we are of our eighteenth-century forbears
for their wine-swilling to the detriment of their descendants. A dinner
party of to-day bears no more relation to a rational gathering of
rational people for the purpose of rational social intercourse than--"

He had run on with his usual astonishing loquacity without drawing
breath, overwhelming Lydia with a fresh flood of words when she tried to
break in; but she now sprang up and motioned him peremptorily to
silence.

"Please, please, Godfather, don't! I asked you not to unsettle
me--you're not kind to do it! You're not kind! I must think it's
important and, and--the necessary thing to do. I _must_!" She put her
hands over her eyes as she spoke. She was trying to shut out a vision of
Paul's embittered face of wrathful chagrin. "That's the trouble with
me," she went on. "Something in me makes it hard for me to think it
important enough to give up everything else for it--and I--"

"Why '_must_' you?" asked the doctor bluntly, crumpling his damp
dishcloth into a ball.

Lydia looked at him and saw Paul so evidently that the doctor saw with
her. "I must! I _must_!" she only repeated.

Dr. Melton opened his mouth wide, closed it again with a snap, and threw
the tightly wadded ball in his hand passionately upon the floor with the
gesture of an angry child. Lydia was standing now, looking down at the
red-faced little man as he peered up at her after his silent outbreak.
His attitude of fury so contrasted with the pacific white apron which
enveloped him, that she broke out into a laugh. Even as she laughed and
turned away to answer a knock at the door, she was acutely thankful that
it was not with Paul that she had been set upon by that swiftly mobile
change of humor, that it was not at Paul that she had launched that
disrespectful mirth.

The person who knocked proved to be a very large, rosy-cheeked female,
who might be a big, overgrown child or a preposterously immature woman
for all Lydia, looking at her in perplexity, could make out. She felt no
thrill of premonition as this individual advanced into the kitchen, a
pair of immense red hands folded before her.

"I'm Anastasia O'Hern, ma'am," she announced with a thick accent of
County Clare