Framed in the soft, white draperies, her face made an attractive picture for the passer-by.  Mrs. McAlister’s girlhood had passed; a certain girlishness, however, would never pass, and her clear blue eyes had all the life and fire they had shown when, as Bess Holden she had been the leader in most of the pranks of her class at Vassar.  The brown hair was still unmarked by grey threads and the complexion was still fresh and rosy, while in expression the face in the window below was far younger than the one peering out from the upper room, just above it.

Allyn McAlister was a graft on the family stock, in temperament, at least.  Born into a genial, jovial, healthy family, his was the only moody nature there.  His brother and sisters might be mischievous or even fractious; but they were never prone to have black half-hours.  It was reserved for the youngest one of them all, Allyn McAlister, aged fifteen, to spell his moods with a capital M. His father was wont to say that Allyn was a mixture of two people, of two nameless, far-off ancestors.  For days at a time, he was a merry, happy-go-lucky boy.  Then, for some slight cause or for no cause at all, he retired within himself for a space when he remained dumb and glowered at the rest of the world morosely.  Then he roused himself and emerged from his self-absorption into a frank crossness which wore away but slowly.  A motherless childhood when he was alternately teased and spoiled by his older sisters and brother had helped on the trouble, and not even the wisdom of his father and the devotion of his stepmother could cure the complaint.  At his best, Allyn was the brightest and most winning of his family; at his worst, it was advisable to let him severely alone.  In the whole wide world, only two persons could manage him in his refractory moods.  One was his father; the other was his sister Theodora, and Theodora had been in Helena, all winter long.  However, she was coming home that night, and Allyn’s nose grew quite white at the tip, as he pressed it against the windowpane, in a futile effort to see still farther up the street.

Theodora, meanwhile, sat watching the familiar landscape sweeping backward past the windows of the express train.  She knew it all by heart, the low hillocks crowned with clusters of shaggy oaks still thick with unshed leaves, the strips of salt marsh with the haycocks like gigantic beehives, the peeps of blue sea, sail-dotted or crossed by a thin line of smoke, and the neat little towns so characteristic of southern New England.  Impulsively she turned to her husband.

“Oh, don’t you pity Hope, Billy?”

“What for?”

“To live out there.  I suppose Archie’s business makes it a necessity; but I do wish he would come back and settle down near us.”

“He would be like a bull in a china shop, Teddy.  Fancy Archie Holden, after having all the Rocky Mountains for his workshop, coming back and settling down into one of these bandboxy little towns!  He is better off, out there.”