high old sofa, just the tips of her toes touching the carpet. She looked about twelve, but she was eighteen. Nobody had ever thought of Hildegarde as grown-up. Nobody but Crispin Harlowe, and he was at college.
She held to her point, arguing it before them all. "I loved my mother," she said, "and I should hate a red dress or a blue one. I should like to put ashes on my head, and tear my hair—"
"That will do, Hildegarde," her Aunt Olivia said. "You can wear black if you want to, but don't get all worked up about it."
Then Hildegarde fled from them all, and rushed up to her room to cry wildly, calling on her mother, "Darling, darling, darling—"
It was nearly three o'clock when at last she rose from her bed and went to the window and looked out. It had been a dry fall, and the trees which lined the driveway had been blown bare by the October winds. There was no wind today, and a sort of amethyst haze enveloped the world. Hildegarde's mother had loved these Indian summer days, with a few grapes still on the vines, a few chrysanthemums still glowing in the garden. Her slight figure seemed to move even now in the midst of that amethystine haze.
The farmhouse stood well back from the road, where there still waited a line of more or less shabby cars. Hildegarde wished that she might get into one of the cars and ride away. She hated to face the loneliness of the house when there was no one left in it but her two aunts and herself. She wondered how she was going to stand it.
Something stirred in her for the first time. Re-
