His Sister

BY MARY APPLEWHITE BACON

“But you couldn’t see me leave, mother, anyway, unless I was there to go.”

It was characteristic of the girl adjusting her new travelling-hat before the dim little looking-glass that, while her heart was beating with excitement which was strangely like grief, she could give herself at once to her stepmother’s inquietude and turn it aside with a jest.

Mrs. Morgan, arrested in her anxious movement towards the door, stood for a moment taking in the reasonableness of Stella’s proposition, and then sank back to the edge of her chair.  “The train gets here at two o’clock,” she argued.

Lindsay Cowart came into the room, his head bent over the satchel he had been mending.  “You had better say good-by to Stella here at the house, mother,” he suggested; “there’s no use for you to walk down to the depot in the hot sun.”  And then he noticed that his stepmother had on her bonnet with the veil to it—­she had married since his father’s death and was again a widow,—­and, in extreme disregard of the September heat, was dressed in the black worsted of a diagonal weave which she wore only on occasions which demanded some special tribute to their importance.

She began smoothing out on her knees the black gloves which, in her nervous haste to be going, she had been holding squeezed in a tight ball in her left hand.  “I can get there, I reckon,” she answered with mild brevity, and as if the young man’s words had barely grazed her consciousness.

A moment later she went to the window and, with her back to Lindsay, poured the contents of a small leather purse into one hand and began to count them softly.

He looked up again.  “I am going to pay for Stella’s ticket, mother.  You must not do it,” he said.

She replaced the money immediately, but without impatience, and as acquiescing in his assumption of his sister’s future.  “You have done so much already,” he apologized; but he knew that she was hurt, and chafed to feel that only the irrational thing on his part would have seemed to her the kind one.

Stella turned from the verdict of the dim looking-glass upon her appearance to that of her brother’s face.  As she stood there in that moment of pause, she might have been the type of all innocent and budding life.  The delicacy of floral bloom was in the fine texture of her skin, the purple of dewy violets in her soft eyes; and this new access of sadness, which was as yet hardly conscious of itself, had thrown over the natural gayety of her young girlhood something akin to the pathetic tenderness which veils the earth in the dawn of a summer morning.

He felt it to be so, but dimly; and, young himself and already strained by the exactions of personal desires, he answered only the look of inquiry in her face,—­“Will the merchants here never learn any taste in dry-goods?”