been easier to fancy a sleeping weasel.  Nevertheless the boy liked Miss Penelope.  Ruth and he had learned while they were little children, that there was no unkindness in the snapping of her sharp little black eyes, and that the terrible things she said were as harmless as heat lightning.  Even the little cup-bearers, black, brown, and yellow, all knew how kind-hearted she was, and did not mind in the least the most appalling threats uttered by her sweet, soft voice.  She always gave them something before she sent them flying back to the cabins.  Everybody liked her better than the widow Broadnax who never scolded or meddled and indeed, rarely spoke at all to any one upon any subject.  For the household had long since come to understand that this lady, like many another of her kind, was silent mainly because she had nothing to say; and that she never found fault, simply because she did not care.  Indifference like hers often passes for amiability; and that sort of motionless silence conceals a vacuum quite as often as it covers a deep.  Only one thing ever fully aroused the widow Broadnax; and this was to see her half-sister taking authority in her own brother’s house.  And indeed, that were enough to rouse the veriest mollusk of a woman.  In the case of the widow Broadnax this natural feeling was not at all affected by the fact that she was too indolent to make the exertion to claim and fill her rightful place as mistress of the house.  It did not matter in the least that she lay and slept like a sloth while poor little Miss Penelope was up and working like a beaver.  No woman’s claims ever have anything to do with her deserts; perhaps no man’s ever have either; perhaps all who claim most deserve least.  At all events, it was perfectly natural that the widow Broadnax should feel as truly and deeply aggrieved at her half-sister’s ruling her own brother’s house, as if she, herself, had been the most energetic and capable of housekeepers.

On that morning her dull eyes kept an unwavering, unwinking watch over the coffee making; as they always did over every encroachment upon her rights.  Her heavy eyelids were only partially lifted, yet not a movement of Miss Penelope’s restless little body, not a gesture of her nervous little hands was allowed to escape.  Now that the coffee was nearly ready, Miss Penelope had become rather more composed.  She still stood guard over the coffee-pot; she never left it till she carried it to the table with her own hands, but she was lapsing into a sort of spent silence.  She merely sighed at intervals with the contented weariness that comes from a sense of duty well done.  But her half-sister still eyed her as a fat, motionless spider eyes a buzzing little fly which is ceasing to flutter.  Miss Penelope had not observed a large pewter cup resting on the floor near the widow Broadnax’s chair.  It had been left there by a careless servant, who had used a portion of the mixture of red paint and sour buttermilk