Agatha’s ring was answered by a half-grown girl, who looked scared when she saw a stranger at the door.  Agatha walked into the parlor, in spite of the girl’s hesitation In inviting her, and directed her to say to Mrs. Stoddard that Miss Redmond, from the old red house, wished particularly to see her.  The girl’s face assumed an expression of intelligent and ecstatic curiosity.

“Oh!” she breathed.  Then, “She’s putting up plums, but she can come out in a few minutes.”  She could not go without lingering to look at Agatha, her wide-eyed gaze taking note of her hair, her dress, her hands, her face.  As Agatha became conscious of the ingenuous inspection to which she was subjected, she smiled at the girl—­one of her old, radiant, friendly smiles.

“Run now, and tell Mrs. Stoddard, there’s a good child!  And sometime you must come to see me at the red house; will you?”

The girl’s face lighted up as if the sun had come through a cloud.  She smiled at Agatha in return, with a “Yes” under her breath.  Thus are slaves made.

Left alone in the cool, dim parlor, so orderly and spotless, Agatha had a presentiment of the prejudice of class and of religion against which she was about to throw herself.  Susan Stoddard’s fanaticism was not merely that of an individual; it represented the stored-up strength of hardy, conscience-driven generations.  The Stoddards might build themselves houses with model laundries, but they did not thereby transfer their real treasure from the incorruptible kingdom.  If they were not ruled by aesthetic ideals, neither were they governed by thoughts of worldly display.  This fragrant, clean room bespoke character and family history.  Agatha found herself absently looking down at a white wax cross, entwined with wax flowers, standing under a glass on the center-table.  It was a strange piece of handicraft.  Its whiteness was suggestive of death, not life, and the curving leaves and petals, through which the vital sap once flowed, were beautiful no longer, now that their day of tender freshness was so inappropriately prolonged.  As Agatha, with mind aloof, wondered vaguely at the laborious patience exhibited in the work, her eye caught sight of an inscription molded in the wax pedestal:  “Brother.”  Her mind was sharply brought back from the impersonal region of speculation.  What she saw was not merely a sentimental, misguided attempt at art; it was Susan Stoddard’s memorial of her brother, Hercules Thayer—­the man who had so unexpectedly influenced Agatha’s own life.  To Susan Stoddard this wax cross was the symbol of the companionship of childhood, and of all the sweet and bitter involved in the inexplicable bond of blood relationship.  Agatha felt more kindly toward her because of this mute, fantastic memorial.  She looked up almost with her characteristic friendly smile as she heard slow, steady steps coming down the hall.

The eyes that returned Agatha’s look were not smiling, though they did not look unkind.  They gazed, without embarrassment, as without pride, into Agatha’s face, as if they would probe at once to the covered springs of action.  Mrs. Stoddard was a thick-set woman, rather short, looking toward sixty, with iron-gray hair parted in the middle and drawn back in an old-fashioned, pretty way.