bellion. Anything would be better than this. If her mother had not left her so suddenly, they might have planned it.
There was a tap on her door. "Hildegarde."
"Yes, Aunt Catherine."
Her aunt came in. In her hand she held a little red-lacquered box. "Your mother left it for you," she said. "I thought this was the time to give it to you. It is always hardest after the funeral."
It came to Hildegarde, with a kind of shock, that Aunt Catherine, too, was unhappy. The plump, flat face showed signs of weeping. She stood there, bulbous and ungainly in her black dress, a picture of unattractive woe.
"I don't know how we are going to get along without Bessie," she said. Her features were contorted; her bosom rose and fell.
Hildegarde had never liked to have them call her mother "Bessie," but now there seemed something pathetic in the return to the childish name—there had been a time when the three sisters had been to each other "Katie" and "Ollie" and "Bessie." It had been her mother who had stopped the use of the diminutives—"Olivia" and "Catherine" and "Elizabeth" were too lovely, she had said, to be spoiled.
Yet now Aunt Catherine had gone back to the little name, and Hildegarde was moved by it and felt a sense of nearness and affection for her poor old aunt, and of compunction that she had wanted to leave her.
"Oh, Aunt Catherine," she said, "why did God do it?"
Something soft and luminous shone in Aunt Cath-
