changed. A sadness had come to her. Now with the
patient, friendly, gentle mother talk of Mrs. Drehten, this sadness
changed to resignation and to rest.

As the evening came on the young ones dropped in one by one. Soon the
merry Sunday evening supper was begun.

It had not been all comfort for our Anna, these months of knowing
Mrs. Drehten. It had made trouble for her with the family of her half
brother, the fat baker.

Her half brother, the fat baker, was a queer kind of a man. He was a
huge, unwieldy creature, all puffed out all over, and no longer able
to walk much, with his enormous body and the big, swollen, bursted
veins in his great legs. He did not try to walk much now. He sat
around his place, leaning on his great thick stick, and watching his
workmen at their work.

On holidays, and sometimes of a Sunday, he went out in his bakery
wagon. He went then to each customer he had and gave them each a
large, sweet, raisined loaf of caky bread. At every house with many
groans and gasps he would descend his heavy weight out of the wagon,
his good featured, black haired, flat, good natured face shining with
oily perspiration, with pride in labor and with generous kindness.
Up each stoop he hobbled with the help of his big stick, and into the
nearest chair in the kitchen or in the parlour, as the fashion of the
house demanded, and there he sat and puffed, and then presented to the
mistress or the cook the raisined german loaf his boy supplied him.

Anna had never been a customer of his. She had always lived in another
part of the town, but he never left her out in these bakery progresses
of his, and always with his own hand he gave her her festive loaf.

Anna liked her half brother well enough. She never knew him really
well, for he rarely talked at all and least of all to women, but
he seemed to her, honest, and good and kind, and he never tried to
interfere in Anna's ways. And then Anna liked the loaves of raisined
bread, for in the summer she and the second girl could live on them,
and not be buying bread with the household money all the time.

But things were not so simple with our Anna, with the other members of
her half brother's house.

Her half brother's family was made up of himself, his wife, and their
two daughters.

Anna never liked her brother's wife.

The youngest of the two daughters was named after her aunt Anna.

Anna never liked her half brother's wife. This woman had been very
good to An