rl needs in this world
to make her happy and free from care is a woman to be a mother to
her. I am making her see it. I can make up to her for everything.
Everything is as it should be."

She stood gazing at Rose for a long moment before she spoke. "Well,"
said she, "you look like a whole jewelry shop. I don't see, for my
part, how your aunt came to have so many--why she wanted them."

"Maybe they were given to her," said Rose. A tender thought of the
dead woman who had gone from the house of her fathers, and left her
jewels behind, softened her face. "Poor Aunt Abrahama!" said she.
"She lived in this house all her life and was never married, and she
must have come to think that all her pretty things had not amounted
to much."

"I don't see why," said Sylvia. "I don't see that it was any great
hardship to live all her life in this nice house, and I don't see
what difference it made about her having nice things, whether she got
married or not. It could not have made any difference."

"Why not?" asked Rose, looking at her with a mischievous flash of
blue eyes. A long green gleam like a note of music shot out from the
emerald on her finger as she raised it in a slight gesture. "To have
all these beautiful things put away in a drawer, and never to have
anybody see her in them, must have made some difference."

"It wouldn't make a mite," said Sylvia, stoutly.

"I don't see why."

"Because it wouldn't."

Rose laughed, and looked again at herself in the glass.

"Now you had better take off those things and go to bed, and try to
go to sleep," said Sylvia.

"Yes, Aunt Sylvia," said Rose. But she did not stir, except to turn
this way and that, to bring out more colored lights from the jewels.

Sylvia had to mix bread that night, and she was obliged to go. Rose
promised that she would immediately go to bed, and kissed her again
with such effusion that the older woman started back. The soft,
impetuous kiss caused her cheek to fairly tingle as she went
down-stairs and about her work. It should have been luminous from the
light it made in her heart.

When Henry came home, with a guilty sense of what he was to do next
day, and which he had not courage enough to reveal, he looked at his
wife with relief at her changed expression. "I declare, Sylvia, you
look like yourself to-night," he said. "You've been looking kind of
curious to me lately."

"You imagined it," said Sylvia. She had finished mixing the bread,
and had