her hand from Joanna's shoulder, who lay motionless.
"I'm thankful enough that you sent for me when you did and told me. I've had an inkling of it before from something that Joe Ward said to Tom at his office, and I only wish that you'd had the sense to call me sooner. I'm not altogether ignorant, if you are." Her voice took on the professional tone of a physician. "I know life, and I've had experience with men. Why, my dear, it is so out of your line. From a little girl in pantalettes—no, of course you didn't wear pantalettes; I don't know as I did myself—but at any rate from a mere child, you know, you've never looked at a man except in the abstract and collectively. Everybody has noticed it, and I don't deny that in a way it has been a charm and certainly a protection. Who but you could have gone on dancing after Hepner, as you did, and sitting in the room with every portrait he painted! I haven't forgotten that queer, one-eyed man who played the violin and got his dinner here every night, and Professor Murray—with two wives, I mean—though in simple justice I believe he did think one of them was dead,—who stayed in this very house for four mortal months. That couldn't have happened to another woman in Boston!"
Mrs. McTavish had left her chair and was standing in the centre of the room, her restless hands busy with some tall roses on the table. Suddenly Joanna sat up.
"You're taking me just as I thought you would, Louisa." Her lips parted in a small smile. "I've lain here quietly until you were finished; I haven't been weeping, only waiting. I've told you everything, and for the last two hours you've disapproved and laughed and scolded in the very words that said you wouldn't, and you've succeeded in using me up entirely. I haven't asked advice because I didn't want it. I've simply told you because you are my sister, and I think you ought to know. But a woman of forty—if you insist on cataloguing me—doesn't wear a man's ring on her third finger and then ask another woman if she shall put it on."
The sunlight enlivened the diamond on the slender hand that she held out.
"Of course my being fifteen years older than Harry is, I suppose, a pity; but with such a disparity," she added, rather primly, "there is always a real feeling, I think, that gives a better basis for happiness than a conventional suitability."
She smiled again, rose from her seat, her soft gown floated with her, and put an eager arm about the other. "So let's call off all this talk, Loulie, at least between you and me. I've promised Harry, and I shall marry him. I'm very happy," she added, softly, "and very sure—"
Mrs. McTavish shook her head and looked gravely through her glasses.
"You've promised, Nanna, but you haven't married him yet. That's quite a different matter. There's a time between that's hard for us women, when we measure and weigh and watch and hope and deny and ponder."
The clock on the mantel chimed and caught her ear.
"My dear, we use up every verb!" she ended, with a laugh, and stepped to the window. "There, my child, it's five o'clock, and George has come for me. Good-by, dear,—not another word. The four-forty on next Saturday week, you and your Harry. I've got two or three other people."
She held Joanna's face in a kiss and ran down the steps. As her carriage door closed, a man clean-shaven, ruddy, and long-limbed turned in at the gate.
To be handsome, successful, and well-beloved; to have closed the chapters of endeavor at twenty-five; to have crowned youth with the rewards of age,—this comes to but few, but in good measure it had come to Harry Doane. Mrs. McTavish read him not in her books. His world was not hers, and he knew not her gods; but old Hepner would have told you that the boy was a genius. "Gad, sir, he paints as well as I do, only you fools won't have it—he paints hands better, and when he turns of sixty"—he shrugged a heavy shoulder,—"why, egad again! John Hepner will have been forgotten!"
Born of clever, simple folk in a New England village, their one child, he had evaded spoiling only because of a great talent. A pencil in his baby hand had
