“I’m afraid Edith is hurt about something,” said Deborah to her father, about a month after this little talk.  “She hasn’t been near us for over three weeks.”

“Let her be!” said Roger, in alarm.  “I mean,” he hastily added, “why can’t you let Edith come when she likes?  There’s nothing the matter.  It’s simply her children—­they take up her time.”

“No,” said Deborah calmly, “it’s I. She as good as told me so last month.  She thinks I’ve become a perfect fanatic—­without a spare moment or thought for my family.”

“Oh, my family!” Roger groaned.  “I tell you, Deborah, you’re wrong!  Edith’s children are probably sick in bed!”

“Then I’ll go and see,” she answered.

* * * * *

“Something has happened to Deborah,” Edith informed him blithely, over the telephone the next night.

“Has, eh,” grunted Roger.

“Yes, she was here to see me to-day.  And something has happened—­she’s changing fast.  I felt it in all kinds of ways.  She was just as dear as she could be—­and lonely, as though she were feeling her age.  I really think we can do something now.”

“All right, let’s do something,” Roger growled.

And Edith began to do something.  Her hostility to her sister had completely disappeared.  In its place was a friendly affection, an evident desire to please.  She even drew Laura into the secret, and there was a gathering of the clan.  There were consultations in Roger’s den.  “Deborah is to get married.”  The feeling of it crept through the house.  Nothing was said to her, of course, but Deborah was made to feel that her two sisters had drawn close.  And their influence upon her choice was more deep and subtle than she knew.  For although Roger’s family had split so wide apart, between his three daughters there were still mysterious bonds reaching far back into nursery days.  And Deborah in deciding whether to marry Allan Baird was affected more than she was aware by the married lives of her sisters.  All she had seen in Laura’s menage, all that she had ever observed in Edith’s growing family, kept rising from time to time in her thoughts, as she vaguely tried to picture herself a wife and the mother of children.

So the family, with those subtle bonds from the past, began to press steadily closer and closer around this one unmarried daughter, and help her to make up her mind.

CHAPTER XVII

But she did not appear to care to be helped.  Nor did Allan—­he rarely came to the house, and he went to Edith’s not at all.  He was even absent from her Christmas tree for the children, a jolly little festivity which neither he nor Deborah had missed in years.

“What has got into him?” Roger asked.  And shortly after Christmas he called the fellow up on the ’phone.  “Drop in for dinner to-night,” he urged.  And he added distinctly, “I’m alone.”