ive element to become active. It was
difficult for him to visualize her as an established factor in his
life, either as the restful center of a home or the adaptable companion
of his nomadic wanderings. The precise nature of her lack he had not
felt the necessity to characterize.

The concluding chords of his song vibrated into silence. With the
ceasing of the actual sounds, his imagined music began to move again
along its interrupted course; then a crash of Brahms broke into his
creative weavings, and he frowned, not only for the interruption:
Stella should not attempt Brahms. The hazardous attempt broke off
as abruptly as it had begun. There was something fragmentary, or
perhaps more correctly, something unfinished about Stella. She never
had just fulfilled the promise of their first meeting. The bee theme
drifted into his mind again, and had progressed a few measures, when
the evolving harmonic pattern was again invaded by an alien presence,
a soft one of dim outline and faded voice, his Aunt Lucretia.

"You are coming in for tea, Mark." She paused, characteristically
tentative, wavering, fearful of intruding, a gentle, kindly, ineffectual
presence. "And Stella is here," she added.

"I heard her." Mark rose to his excellent height and stood an instant
looking down at the little old lady shading her eyes from the sunlight.
They had been large and dark once; now the filmy rim of age was visible
about the iris. Her white hair lay in neat ringlets upon her brow, which
was wrinkled like a fine parchment. Her skin, bleached to a bloodless
whiteness, retained still some of the soft texture of youth.

"And Allison Clyde," she finished her announcement: "but you won't mind
her," she added, recalling the restiveness of the present generation
under boredom.

"Allison Clyde?" he repeated. He remembered the name vaguely as one of
some old friend of the family. "An old lady." He had not reckoned his
indifferent label a question, but his aunt took it up.

"We never think of her as that. She is younger," Lucretia Hall conceded,
"than I am. Allison is universally admired. Mrs. Herrick"--she quoted
the oracle of her circle in that last-generation manner that proclaims
the accepted--"says that Allison is a personage."

Miss Lucretia turned toward the house; her nephew followed her.

"Any relation to the historian, bane of my youth?" he asked.

"His daughter," Lucretia gladly expounded; "and her brother, the poet,
died young.