rucking up the carpet.

The two women stood looking at each other. Then Jane said: "I saw you coming. I've been looking out for you, of course. Only I wasn't going to let you in right in front of that driver —right with him looking on. Not that he'd make any difference, but there 're always plenty of people got nothing to do but rubber round that might ask him questions."

"Yes, I know," Ada Saffrans said, steadily enough. She obeyed the other's gesture, entering; and Jane pushed the door to with another struggle.

"It's swelled. It always does the minute the weather begins to get soft this way outside," she explained. "You can go on in the front parlor, Ada. It's the same like always. Everything's just the same about the house, I mean. You know I never was much of a hand to go shifting things around, just out of restlessness-"

Mrs. Saffrans again obeyed, divining that Jane, beneath the surface, was as confusedly and painfully agitated as she herself. That broken and unnatural fluency betrayed her; then, too, there might have been some scenes with Isabelle. Poor Jane! In the parlor there was the set of ebonized furniture she remembered so well, with the gilt groovings, the rows of toy balustrades along the tops and backs of everything, the spoollike ornaments on the corners. There was the cabinet mantel going up to the ceiling with the big mirror in the middle and the small subordinate mirrors at the sides behind the brackets and post-office-box cubbyholes. The miniature easel with Elmer's photograph, standing up, resting the knuckles of one hand on a table, was in its old place on the top of the piano. "Pharaoh's Horses" in a circular metallic-looking frame still hung over the sofa. The room was cold and she changed her mind in the act of loosening her fur scarf, readjusting it instead. Jane went about with nervous movements, jerking

tion that, puttering at the lace curtains which were matched point to point, with some of the points securely pinned together to obviate a tendency to "yaw crooked"-yawing crooked constituting, by Jane's standards, one of the gravest indictments that could be brought against a housekeeper.

"I don't believe anybody could see through 'em, even if they were to come up close," she now remarked. "And it's better to have the windows look the way they always are. If I was to pull the blinds down, right in the broad daylight, somebody'd suspect something, sure. Anyway, if anybody wants to know, I've made up to tell 'em you were a book agent or something; lots of 'em go round in machines nowadays." She halted, out of breath, patently trying to get herself together. "I expect you better sit down, Ada. We've got to talk," she said, with the air of apologizing to her own conscience for some sort of concession.

Mrs. Saffrans did not at once accept the invitation-so to call it. "Isn'tis Isabelle here?" she asked, still standing expectantly.

"No. She don't get back for half an hour yet-from class, you know."

"Class?" repeated the other, vaguely surprised. "She's not in school still?"

"No, not school-college. She's going to Baptist Union now-she's a junior. Isabelle's twenty-one. I guess you've forgotten," said Jane, acidly.

Mrs. Saffrans made a little deprecating sound, a little gesture, and sat down. About her movements, about her whole presence, there was still the unconscious and unassuming elegance by which Jane had always been obscurely irritated. She was irritated now, surveying Ada with a hostility which she did not recognize, and certainly never would have admitted, to be based ultimately on jealousy. Jealous of Ada Redway-or Saffrans or whatever she chose to call herself-she jealous of her? That was likely, wasn't it? No respectable per

son, nobody who knew about Ada, would touch her with a pair of tongs! Jane felt, or desperately tried to feel, that she herself was stretching a point, behaving with a magnanimity rarely met with, to allow the woman in the house, even on Isabelle's account. It was a wonder that Ada had the face to come back here to Acme, where she was known, at all; yet here she was, as cool and uppity as ever, putting everybody else at a disadvantage, the way she always had done, somehow!

"You hold your age pretty well, Ada," she said, abruptly, with a sort of grudging admiration. "I expect anybody can, though, that hasn't much to do except take care of themselves."

"Yes, I have had rather a lazy time of it these last three years," said Mrs. Saffrans, with composure. "Before that, when I was working, it wasn't quite so easy."

"I wouldn't call being on the stage work," said Jane, in her harsh, strident voice.

Mrs. Saffrans contemplated her musingly for a moment in silence. "You haven't changed much, either, Jane," she said. It was the truth. Jane, so people were in the habit of saying, was "Redway clear through," and the family looks were of a type upon which the passage of years made a singularly light impression. At twenty-five, Jane's straight, coarse, strong-growing black hair was already beginning to be threaded with gray; heavy lines already showed in her swarthily sallow face; now, at fifty-odd, she was only a little grayer, a little more wrinkled, and the outlines of her flat, angular body, the waist somewhat too long in proportion to the legs, indicated under the darkcolored gingham dress not one ounce more or less of flesh.

"Well, you needn't think I wanted to tell her, Ada," said Jane, sharply. "It wasn't an easy thing to do, tell a girl a thing like that about her own mother. To be sure, she don't remember you; she wouldn't know you if she saw you, any more than any other stranger. But all the same, it wasn't easy telling her. I didn't want to; I just had to, that was all."

Mrs. Saffrans murmured inarticulately, stroking her muff with a mechanical movement. Nothing in her attitude suggested protest or adverse comment, yet Jane Redway charged her with both. That was Ada all over, acting so -so superior, she thought, vexed by the self-conscious uneasiness that of old had so often assailed her in Ada's company. The idea of her acting superior! "You needn't to think I liked it. I just wanted to do what was right," she insisted, truculently.

"I understand. You have always done right, Jane, I know."

"I try to, anyhow," said Jane, unplacated. "That's another thing I want to tell you, Ada, before Isabelle comes. I never have said one single, solitary word to her that might set her against you. I wouldn't do a thing like that. Because, after all, you're her mother, and it wouldn't be right. When I told her, I just told her the plain truth, not another thing more or less. 'Isabelle,' I said, 'I'm going to tell you once for all, and there's no use asking me any

have to make up your own mind, all by yourself. I won't have a thing to do with it,' I said. I said: 'Your mother went off and left your father and you when you were about a year old. She went off with-with a man,' I said. 'That's the reason you don't remember her and you don't ever hear anybody say anything about her. That's all I'm going to tell you, Isabelle,' I said, 'because it's all I know of my own knowledge. If your father'd have lived, he'd maybe have told you himself; maybe he'd have told you something more or different, but that's none of my affair. He never talked to me about it or said what he was going to do, and you know the way he died; he couldn't tell me anything he wanted, even at the end when folks generally do if they're conscious and got anything on their minds. If he'd told me I'd have told you in his own exact words because I'd have taken 'em down in writing. But he didn't, so I don't know, and I can't say anything more. You got to make up your own mind about it,' I said-"

She had to pause, out of breath again; silence, falling abruptly upon the din of loud, rapid words, produced an almost grotesque effect of peace and relief. Jane, however, was not aware of it; the statement of her own position, so secure, so admirably taken, reinforced and stabilized her; it was with a justifiable complacence that from the heights of blamelessness she now surveyed the contrast between herself and the other woman, erstwhile subtly disquieting.

"Of course I had to answer some of the things the child wanted to know," she felt that she could admit without weakening her stand. "But I never told her anything but the plain truth. It began that way with her asking questions, I mean, like any child would. Wanting to know who all her folks was, and didn't she have anybody but Redways, and where was her mother's folks-all things like that. I just told her the plain truth. I said: 'Your mother didn't have anybody to speak

of. She was an orphan and didn't have any family, only considerable prop'ty, and living over at Sunville with some people-but they weren't any kin to her-when your father met her. She came over here along with some other girls and fellows in some theatrical tableaux for the foreign missions that they were getting up in the First M. E. Church. I believe the ladies had a sale and supper, too, but I couldn't say for certain; maybe that was another time— anyway that was the first time your father saw her. That's how they came to get married.' That's all I told Isabelle to begin with; then afterwards I had to tell her the rest. I told her about him, too-only just what I knew, not another thing, not even the name, because, for all I could say, that might have been a made-up one, and I wasn't going to say anything but what I knew," said Jane, rigorously. "I told her he was an actor and he was in a stock comp'ny they had acting in Columbus one winter, and I supposed that was where you met, but I couldn't say. She could just take it or leave it. I was bound and determined I wouldn't lift my finger to influence her."

There ensued another silence during which Jane warily and defiantly held herself in readiness for an attack on some count; but when, at length, Mrs. Saffrans spoke it was merely to make the disappointingly harmless remark, "But Isabelle knows who I am?"

"On the stage, you mean, I suppose. Yes. She ran across the name and notices in the papers, and then when sheshe" Jane hesitated, visibly bracing herself to the bolting of some distasteful mouthful. Mrs. Saffrans must have guessed at the nature of it, for she lifted a hand again in the pretty, deprecating gesture, but Jane went on, heroically-"she saw it on the checks every month, and right off she wanted to know who that Ada Saffrans was, and if it was the same one, or-or who. So I told her. And-and I want to say I appreciate your sending that money, Ada.”

"I've tried to use it for Isabelle's best advantage," Jane said, grimly, resentful and perplexed. The honors of the situation seemed to be slipping away from her; she could not understand how or why, but put it down to Ada's familiar smooth artifices. "I've kept account of every cent of it, so you can see how it's been spent. Some has to go for the house, of course, every once in a while. I can't help that. It's Isabelle's home, anyhow, so she's getting the good of the money just the same as if it was being paid out for her clothes and schooling. The house has to be kept up. Isabelle gets it all except that. We don't have any girl, just a woman in to help clean sometimes-" Jane was arrested by the startling and still more disagreeable and mystifying discovery that she was actually stooping to explanations and justi*fications, with Ada, of all people! "Not that we need the money," she said, hastily. "Elmer left enough. It's only that everything is so much higher than it used to be—and then there had to be so much paid out, the way he died was so expensive. It cost so much right at the last."

Mrs. Saffrans looked puzzled. "I understood it was-I--I thought you wrote there was an accident-?" she said, shrinkingly.

"Well, there was. It was just like I told you. He fell down the cellarway; the doors gave way under him. It hurt his spine somehow, so he couldn't ever move himself or talk distinct afterwards, but he didn't die right away. He lingered and lingered. Well, there's no use questioning the Lord's judgments,' said Jane, momentarily oblivious of her audience in recollections that moved her

with a sort of pious impatience. "Still—! Elmer couldn't get well-it wasn't as if there had been hope for him—and there was all that nursing and doctors-specialists, too. If it had been somebody else's cellar door, we'd have had a good case for damages, and that would have helped with the expenses, or maybe covered 'em all. But here it was our own! I don't know how many times I told Elmer he'd ought to have those old doors fixed, or somebody'd break their neck there; but he kept putting off till he could get it done reasonable, he was always so saving."

After another pause Mrs. Saffrans said, “Isabelle knew her father?"

"Oh yes! She was ten or eleven when it happened. She remembers him real well."

"They-they were very fond of each other? They must have been," Mrs. Saffrans hinted, timidly. “It must have been hard for her."

66

"Well, children get over things pretty soon. Elmer didn't spoil her. He wasn't that kind, nor I, either. Isabelle's been well enough brought up, you needn't to worry," said Jane, in savage sarcasm. She'll always act right. She's areal Redway. And she's got a good Redway business head on her shoulders, too. That time I told her about you she didn't say hardly anything, just studied awhile, and then first thing she asked was what became of the prop'ty-what I'd told her you had, you know. I just told her the plain truth, that you'd got it still, for all I knew. I told her she'd get it, or some of it, anyhow, when you died; she couldn't be lawed out of her share. It was Elmer's idea not to do anything about it just now, nor get a divorce, even. divorce, even. She understood right off and said: 'Why, yes, Aunt Jane, if he'd gone to law, it would likely have et up all the money, anyhow, because the lawyers always get everything in the end. So it's better to be patient and leave things the way they are.' Isabelle wasn't more than fourteen then; but you could see she was a regular Red