“Presently—­not now,” she said, “I want to talk to you awhile.  Do you know, Aunt Rosa was here again to-day and she still tries to persuade us to sell the house and move uptown.  It is so far for her to come from Seventieth Street, she says, but as for me I’d positively hate the change and Aunt Angela can’t even stand the mention of it.”  She leaned forward and stroked his arm with one of her earnest gestures.  “What would you do uptown, dear Uncle Percival?” she inquired gently.

The old man laid the flute on his knees, where his shrunken little hands still caressed it.  “Do? why I’d die if you dragged me away from my roots,” he answered.

Laura smiled, still smoothing him down as if he were an amiable dog.  “Well, the Park is very pleasant, you know,” she returned, “and it is full of walks, too.  You wouldn’t lack space for exercise.”

“The Park?  Pooh!” piped Uncle Percival, raising his voice; “I wouldn’t give these streets for the whole of Central Park together.  Why, I’ve seen these pavements laid and relaid for seventy years and I remember all the men who walked over them.  Did I ever tell you of the time I strolled through Irving Place with Thackeray?  As for Central Park, it hasn’t an ounce—­not an ounce of atmosphere.”

“Oh, well, that settles it,” laughed Laura.  “We’ll keep to our own roots.  We are all of one mind, you and Aunt Angela and I.”

“I’m sure Angela would never hear of it,” pursued Uncle Percival, “and in her affliction how could one expect it?”

For a moment Laura looked at him in a compassionate pause before she made her spring.  “There’s nothing in the world the matter with Aunt Angela,” she said; “she’s perfectly well.”

Blank wonder crept into the old gentleman’s little blue eyes and he shook his head several times in solemn if voiceless protest.  Forty years ago Angela Wilde, as a girl of twenty, had in the accustomed family phrase “brought lasting disgrace upon them,” and she had dwelt, as it were, in the shadow of the pillory ever since.  Unmarried she had yielded herself to a lover, and afterward when the full scandal had burst upon her head, though she had not then reached the fulfilment of a singularly charming beauty, she had condemned herself to the life of a solitary prisoner within four walls.  She had never since the day of her awakening mentioned the name of her faithless or unfortunate lover, but her silent magnanimity had become the expression of a reproach too deep for words, and her bitter scorn of men had so grown upon her in her cloistral existence that there were hours together when she could not endure even the inoffensive Percival.  Cold, white, and spectral as one of the long slim candles on an altar, still beautiful with an indignant and wounded loveliness, she had become in the end at once the shame and the romance of her family.

“There is no reason under the sun why Aunt Angela shouldn’t come down to dinner with us to-night,” persisted Laura.  “Don’t you see that by encouraging her as you did in her foolish attitude, you have given her past power over her for life and death.  It is wrong—­it is ignoble to bow down and worship anything—­man, woman, child, or event, as she bows down and worships her trouble.”