.

"What made you break it off with Brookes Ormsby?" she snapped; adding: "I
don't wonder you were ashamed to tell me about it."

"I did not break it off; and I was not ashamed." Elinor had regained her
self-control, and the angry light in the far-seeing eyes was giving place
to the cool gray blankness which she cultivated.

"That is what Brookes told me, but I didn't believe him," said the mother.
"It's all wrong, anyway, and I more than half believe David Kent is at the
bottom of it."

Elinor left her chair and went to the window, which looked down on the
sanatorium, the ornate parterre, and the crescent driveway. These family
bickerings were very trying to her, and the longing to escape them was
sometimes strong enough to override cool reason and her innate sense of
the fitness of things.

In her moments of deepest depression she told herself that the prolonged
struggle was making her hard and cynical; that she was growing more and
more on the Grimkie side and shrinking on the Brentwood. With the
unbending uprightness of the Grimkie forebears there went a prosaic and
unmalleable strain destructive alike of sentiment and the artistic ideals.
This strain was in her blood, and from childhood she had fought it,
hopefully at times, and at other times, as now, despairingly. There were
tears in her eyes when she turned to the window; and if they were merely
tears of self-pity, they were better than none. Once, in the halcyon
summer, David Kent had said that the most hardened criminal in the dock
was less dangerous to humanity than the woman who had forgotten how to
cry.

But into the turmoil of thoughts half indignant, half self-compassionate,
came reproach and a great wave of tenderness filial. She saw, as with a
sudden gift of retrospection, her mother's long battle with inadequacy,
and how it had aged her; saw, too, that the battle had been fought
unselfishly, since she knew her mother's declaration that she could
contentedly "go back to nothing" was no mere petulant boast. It was for
her daughters that she had grown thin and haggard and irritable under the
persistent reverses of fortune; it was for them that she was sinking the
Grimkie independence in the match-making mother.

The tears in Elinor's eyes were not altogether of self-pity when she put
her back to the window. Ormsby was coming up the curved driveway in his
automobile, and she had seen him but dimly through the rising mist of
emotion.

"Have you se