“Why not?” asked Rose, looking at her with a mischievous flash of blue eyes.  A long green gleam like a note of music shot out from the emerald on her finger as she raised it in a slight gesture.  “To have all these beautiful things put away in a drawer, and never to have anybody see her in them, must have made some difference.”

“It wouldn’t make a mite,” said Sylvia, stoutly.

“I don’t see why.”

“Because it wouldn’t.”

Rose laughed, and looked again at herself in the glass.

“Now you had better take off those things and go to bed, and try to go to sleep,” said Sylvia.

“Yes, Aunt Sylvia,” said Rose.  But she did not stir, except to turn this way and that, to bring out more colored lights from the jewels.

Sylvia had to mix bread that night, and she was obliged to go.  Rose promised that she would immediately go to bed, and kissed her again with such effusion that the older woman started back.  The soft, impetuous kiss caused her cheek to fairly tingle as she went down-stairs and about her work.  It should have been luminous from the light it made in her heart.

When Henry came home, with a guilty sense of what he was to do next day, and which he had not courage enough to reveal, he looked at his wife with relief at her changed expression.  “I declare, Sylvia, you look like yourself to-night,” he said.  “You’ve been looking kind of curious to me lately.”

“You imagined it,” said Sylvia.  She had finished mixing the bread, and had washed her hands and was wiping them on the roller-towel in the kitchen.

“Maybe I did,” admitted Henry.  “You look like yourself to-night, anyhow.  How is Rose?”

“Rose is all right.  Young girls are always getting nervous kinks.  I took her supper up to her, and she ate every mite, and now I have given her her aunt’s jewelry and she’s tickled to pieces with it, standing before the looking-glass and staring at herself like a little peacock.”  Sylvia laughed with tender triumph.

“I suppose now she’ll be decking herself out, and every young man in East Westland will be after her,” said Henry.  He laughed, but a little bitterly.  He, also, was not altogether unselfish concerning the proprietorship of this young thing which had come into his elderly life.  He was not as Sylvia, but although he would have denied it he privately doubted if even Horace was quite good enough for this girl.  When it came to it, in his heart of hearts, he doubted if any but the fatherly love which he himself gave might be altogether good for her.

“Rose is perfectly contented just the way she is,” declared Sylvia, turning upon him.  “I shouldn’t be surprised if she lived out her days here, just as her aunt did.”

“Maybe it would be the best thing,” said Henry.  “She’s got us as long as we live.”  Henry straightened himself as he spoke.  Since his resolve to resume his work he had felt years younger.  Lately he had been telling himself miserably that he was an old man, that his life-work was over.  To-night the pulses of youth leaped in his veins.  He was so pleasantly excited that after he and Sylvia had gone to bed it was long before he fell asleep, but he did at last, and just in time for Rose and Horace.