"The journey tired me, but I forgot it in the pleasure of seeing you." All contrition at once, he hastily summoned Kesiah from the storeroom, and between them, with several solicitous maids in attendance, they carried the fragile little lady up to her chamber, where a fire of resinous pine was burning in the big colonial fireplace.
An hour afterwards, when Kesiah had seen her sister peacefully dozing, she went, for the first time since her return, into her own bedroom, and stood looking down on the hearth, where the servants had forgotten to light the sticks that were laid cross-wise on the andirons.

It was the habit of those about her to forget her existence, except when she was needed to render service, and after more than fifty years of such omissions, she had ceased, even in her thought, to pass judgment upon them.

In her youth she had rebelled fiercely--rebelled against nature, against the universe, against the fundamental injustice that divided her sister's lot from her own.

Generations existed only to win love or to bestow it.

Inheritance, training, temperament, all combined to develop the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these--some external shaping of clay--had unfitted her for the purpose for which she was designed.