ll."

"I never said anything of the sort," the mother declared, with a touch
of animation.

"Oh no--you never said it," Julia admitted, "but what else can we think
you mean? Our uncle sends for us to go abroad with him, and you busy
yourself getting me ready, and having new frocks made and all that--and
I never hear a suggestion that you don't want me to go----"

"But I did want you to go," Mrs. Dabney affirmed.

"Well, then, when I come back--when we come back, and tell you what
splendid and generous plans uncle has made for us, and how he has taken
a beautiful furnished house and made it our home, and so on,--why, you
won't even come and look at the house!"

"But I don't want to see it," the mother retorted; obstinately.

"Well, then, you needn't!" said Alfred, rising. "Nobody will ask you
again." "Oh yes they will," urged Julia, glancing meaningly from one
to the other. All her life, as it seemed, she had been accustomed to
mediate between these two unpliable and stubborn temperaments. From her
earliest childhood she had understood, somehow, that there was a Dabney
habit of mind, which was by comparison soft and if not yielding, then
politic: and set over against it there was a Thorpe temper full of
gnarled and twisted hardnesses, and tenacious as death. In the days
of her grandfather Thorpe, whom she remembered with an alarmed
distinctness, there had existed a kind of tacit idea that his name alone
accounted for and justified the most persistent and stormy bad temper.
That old man with the scowling brows bullied everybody, suspected
everybody, apparently disliked everybody, vehemently demanded his own
will of everybody--and it was all to be explained, seemingly, by the
fact that he was a Thorpe.

After his disappearance from the scene--unlamented, to the best of
Julia's juvenile perceptions--there had been relatively peaceful times
in the book-shop and the home overhead, yet there had existed always a
recognized line of demarcation running through the household. Julia and
her father--a small, hollow-chested, round-shouldered young man, with a
pale, anxious face and ingratiating manner, who had entered the shop as
an assistant, and remained as a son-in-law, and was now the thinnest of
unsubstantial memories--Julia and this father had stood upon one side
of this impalpable line as Dabneys, otherwise as meek and tractable
persons, who would not expect to have their own way.

Alfred and his mother were Thorpes-