Mrs. Owen complained after a few days that she saw nothing of Sylvia, so numerous were that young person’s engagements.  Mrs. Bassett and Marian called promptly—­the former a trifle dazed by Sylvia’s sudden advent, and Marian genuinely cordial.  Mrs. Bassett had heard of the approaching visit with liveliest interest.  A year before, when Marian had reported the presence in Mrs. Owen’s house at Indianapolis of a strange girl with Professor Kelton, her curiosity had been piqued, but she soon dismissed the matter.  Marian had carried home little information, and while Mrs. Bassett saw her aunt often on her frequent excursions to the city, she knew by long experience that Mrs. Owen did not yield gracefully to prodding.

Mrs. Bassett had heard all her life of Professor Kelton and she had met him now and then in the Delaware Street house, but her knowledge of him and his family was only the most fragmentary.  Nothing had occurred during the year to bring the Keltons again to her attention; but now, with a casualness in itself disconcerting, they had arrived at Mrs. Owen’s farmhouse, where, Mrs. Bassett was sure, no guests had ever been entertained before.  The house had just been remodeled and made altogether habitable, a fact which, Mrs. Bassett had been flattering herself, argued for Mrs. Owen’s increasing interest in herself and her family.  The immediate arrival of the Keltons was disquieting.

Through most of her life Hallie Bassett had assumed that she and her children, as Sally Owen’s next of kin, quite filled the heart of that admirable though often inexplicable woman.  Mrs. Bassett had herself inherited a small fortune from her father, Blackford F. Singleton, Mrs. Owen’s brother, a judge of the Indiana Supreme Court and a senator in Congress, whose merits and services are set forth in a tablet at the portal of the Fraser County Court-House.  The Bassetts and the Singletons had been early settlers of that region, and the marriage of Hallie Singleton to Morton Bassett was a satisfactory incident in the history of both families.  Six years of Mrs. Bassett’s girlhood had been passed in Washington; the thought of power and influence was dear to her; and nothing in her life had been more natural than the expectation that her children would enjoy the fortune Mrs. Owen had been accumulating so long and, from all accounts, by processes hardly less than magical.  Mrs. Bassett’s humor was not always equal to the strain to which her aunt subjected it.  Hallie Bassett had, in fact, little humor of any sort.  She viewed life with a certain austerity, and in literature she had fortified herself against the shocks of time.  Conduct, she had read, is three fourths of life; and Wordsworth had convinced her that the world is too much with us.  Mrs. Bassett discussed nothing so ably as a vague something she was fond of characterizing as “the full life,” and this she wished to secure for her children.  Her boy’s future lay properly with his father; she had no wish to meddle with it; but Marian was the apple of her eye, and she was striving by all the means in her power to direct her daughter into pleasant paths and bright meadows where the “full life” is assured.  Hers were no mean standards.  She meant to be a sympathetic and helpful wife, the wisest and most conscientious of mothers.