music. She had kissed him good night with infinite tenderness and
love. But she came into her daughter's tiny room after Fanny had gone to
bed, and leaned over, and put a cool hand on the hot forehead.

"Do you feel all right, my darling?"

"Umhmph," replied Fanny drowsily.

"Fanchen, doesn't it make you feel happy and clean to know that you were
able to do the thing you started out to do?"

"Umhmph."

"Only," Molly Brandeis was thinking aloud now, quite forgetting that
she was talking to a very little girl, "only, life seems to take
such special delight in offering temptation to those who are able to
withstand it. I don't know why that's true, but it is. I hope--oh, my
little girl, my baby--I hope----"

But Fanny never knew whether her mother finished that sentence or not.
She remembered waiting for the end of it, to learn what it was her
mother hoped. And she had felt a sudden, scalding drop on her hand where
her mother bent over her. And the next thing she knew it was morning,
with mellow September sunshine.

CHAPTER FOUR

It was the week following this feat of fasting that two things happened
to Fanny Brandeis--two seemingly unimportant and childish things--that
were to affect the whole tenor of her life. It is pleasant to
predict thus. It gives a certain weight to a story and a sense of
inevitableness. It should insure, too, the readers's support to the
point, at least, where the prediction is fulfilled. Sometimes a careless
author loses sight altogether of his promise, and then the tricked
reader is likely to go on to the very final page, teased by the
expectation that that which was hinted at will be revealed.

Fanny Brandeis had a way of going to the public library on Saturday
afternoons (with a bag of very sticky peanut candy in her pocket, the
little sensualist!) and there, huddled in a chair, dreamily and almost
automatically munching peanut brittle, her cheeks growing redder and
redder in the close air of the ill-ventilated room, she would read,
and read, and read. There was no one to censor her reading, so she
read promiscuously, wading gloriously through trash and classic and
historical and hysterical alike, and finding something of interest in
them all.

She read the sprightly "Duchess" novels, where mad offers of marriage
were always made in flower-scented conservatories; she read Dickens, and
Thelma, and old bound Cosmopolitans, and Zola, and de Maupassant, and
the "Wide, Wide World,