“And old enough to be my father—­but it isn’t that.  Age has nothing to do with it, nor has congeniality—­it is nothing in real life that comes between, for I am fond of him and I don’t mind his white hairs in the least, but I can’t give up my visions—­my ideal hopes.”

“Ah, Laura, Laura,” sighed the old man, “the trouble is that you don’t live on the earth at all, but in a little hanging garden of the imagination.”

“And yet I want life,” she said.

“We all want it, my child, until we’ve had it.  At your age I wanted it, too, for I had my dreams, though I was not a poet.  But there are precious few of us who are willing in youth to accept the world on its own terms—­we want to add our little poem to the universal prose of things.”

“But it is life itself that I want,” repeated Laura.

“And so I wanted Rosa, my dear, every bit as much.”

“Rosa!” There was a glow of surprise in the look she turned upon him.

“You find it hard to believe, but it is true nevertheless.  I had my golden dream like everyone else, and when Rosa loved me I told myself it had all come true.  Well, perhaps, in a measure it has, only, after all, Rosa turned out to be more suited to real life than to poetic moonshine.”

“I can’t imagine even you idealizing Aunt Rosa,” said Laura, “but that I suppose is the way life equalises things.”

“That way or another, and the worst it can do for us is to return us our own dreams in grotesque and mutilated forms.  That will most likely be your portion, too, my child, for life has hurt every poet since the world began, and it will hurt you more than most because you are so big a creature.”

Laura stirred suddenly and, after gazing a moment at the fire, turned upon him a face which had grown brilliant with animation.  “I want to taste everything,” she said.  “I want to turn every page one after one.”

“And yet you live the life of a hermit thrush—­you have in reality as little part in that bustling turmoil of New York out there as has poor Angela herself.”

“But my adventures will come to me—­I feel that they will come.”

“Then you’re happy, my dear, for you have the best of your adventures as you call them in your waiting time.”

She leaned toward him, resting her cheek on his gentle old hand, and they sat in silence until Mrs. Payne swept down upon them in her sable wraps and demanded the attendance of her husband.

The hall door closed upon the sisters before Laura had quite come back from her abstraction, which she did at last with a sigh of relief at finding herself alone.  Then, leaving Uncle Percival nodding in the library, she went upstairs to the cosy little study which opened from her bedroom on the floor above.  The wood fire on the brass andirons was unlighted, and striking a match she held it to the little pile of splinters underneath the logs, watching, with a