The immediate arrival of the Keltons was disquieting.
Through most of her life Hallie Bassett had assumed that she and her children, as Sally Owen's next of kin, quite filled the heart of that admirable though often inexplicable woman.

Mrs.Bassett had herself inherited a small fortune from her father, Blackford F.Singleton, Mrs.
Owen's brother, a judge of the Indiana Supreme Court and a senator in Congress, whose merits and services are set forth in a tablet at the portal of the Fraser County Court-House.

The Bassetts and the Singletons had been early settlers of that region, and the marriage of Hallie Singleton to Morton Bassett was a satisfactory incident in the history of both families.

Six years of Mrs.Bassett's girlhood had been passed in Washington; the thought of power and influence was dear to her; and nothing in her life had been more natural than the expectation that her children would enjoy the fortune Mrs.Owen had been accumulating so long and, from all accounts, by processes hardly less than magical.

Mrs.
Bassett's humor was not always equal to the strain to which her aunt subjected it.