“Thank you, Mrs. Gay, it’s only a quarter of a mile and I don’t mind the walk.”

“We’ve brought an overcoat—­Kesiah and I—­a good thick one, for your grandfather.  It worried us last winter that he went so lightly clad during the snow storms.”

Molly’s face changed, and her eyes sparkled with pleasure.

“Oh, thank you, thank you!” she exclaimed, losing her manner of distant politeness.  “I’ve been trying to persuade him to buy one, but he hates to spend money on himself.”

Kesiah, who had leaned back during the conversation, with the scowling look she wore when her heart was moved, nodded grimly while she felt in the black travelling bag she carried for Mrs. Gay’s salts.  She was one of those unfortunate women of a past generation, who, in offering no allurement to the masculine eye, appeared to defeat the single end for which woman was formed.  As her very right to existence lay in her possible power to attract, the denial of that power by nature, or the frustration of it by circumstances, had deprived her, almost from the cradle, of her only authoritative reason for being.  Her small, short-sighted eyes, below a false front which revealed rather than obscured her bare temples, flitted from object to object as though in the vain pursuit of some outside justification of her indelicacy in having permitted herself to be born.

“Samson tells me that my son has come, Molly,” said Mrs. Gay, in a flutter of emotion.  “Have you had a glimpse of him yet?”

The girl nodded.  “He took supper at our house the night he got here.”

“It was such a surprise.  Was he looking well?”

“Very well, I thought, but it was the first time I had seen him, you know.”

“Ah, I forgot.  Are you sure you won’t get in, child?  Well, drive on, Samson, and be very careful of that bird cage.”

Samson drove on at the command, and Molly, plodding obstinately after the carriage, was enveloped shortly in the cloud of dust that floated after the wheels.

CHAPTER VI

TREATS OF THE LADIES’ SPHERE

As the carriage rolled up the drive, there was a flutter of servants between the white columns, and Abednego, the old butler, pushed aside the pink-turbaned maids and came down to assist his mistress to alight.

“Take the bird cage, Abednego, I’ve bought a new canary,” said Mrs. Gay.  “Here, hold my satchel, Nancy, and give Patsey the wraps and umbrellas.”

She spoke in a sweet, helpless voice, and this helplessness was expressed in every lovely line of her figure.  The most casual observer would have discerned that she had surrendered all rights in order to grasp more effectively at all the privileges.  She was clinging and small and delicate and her eyes, her features, her plaintive gestures, united in an irresistible appeal to emotions.

“Where is Jonathan?” she asked, “I hoped he would welcome me.”