Lucy lifted her fluted petticoat, rested her slippered foot on the fender, glanced down at the embroidered silk stocking covering her ankle, and said in a graver tone: 

“I like all kinds of people—­in their proper place.  This is my home, and it is wise to get along with one’s neighbors.  Besides, they all have tongues in their heads like the rest of the human race, and it is just as well to have them wag for you as against you.”

Jane paused for a moment, her eyes watching the blazing logs, and asked with almost a sigh: 

“You don’t mean, dear, that you never intend to help Archie, do you?”

“Never is a long word, Jane.  Wait till he grows up and I see what he makes of himself.  He is now nothing but a great animal, well built as a young bull, and about as awkward.”

Jane’s eyes flashed and her shoulders straightened.  The knife had a double edge to its blade.

“He is your own flesh and blood, Lucy,” she said with a ring of indignation in her voice.  “You don’t treat Ellen so; why should you Archie?”

Lucy took her foot from the fender, dropped her skirts, and looked at Jane curiously.  From underneath the half-closed lids of her eyes there flashed a quick glance of hate—­a look that always came into Lucy’s eyes whenever Jane connected her name with Archie’s.

“Let us understand each other, sister,” she said icily.  “I don’t dislike the boy.  When he gets into trouble I’ll help him in any way I can, but please remember he’s not my boy—­he’s yours.  You took him from me with that understanding and I have never asked him back.  He can’t love two mothers.  You say he has been your comfort all these years.  Why, then, do you want to unsettle his mind?”

Jane lifted her head and looked at Lucy with searching eyes—­looked as a man looks when someone he must not strike has flung a glove in his face.

“Do you really love anything, Lucy?” she asked in a lower voice, her eyes still fastened on her sister’s.

“Yes, Ellen and you.”

“Did you love her father?” she continued in the same direct tone.

“Y-e-s, a little—­ He was the dearest old man in the world and did his best to please me; and then he was never very well.  But why talk about him, dear?”

“And you never gave him anything in return for all his devotion?” Jane continued in the same cross-examining voice and with the same incisive tone.

“Yes, my companionship—­whenever I could.  About what you give Doctor John,” and she looked at Jane with a sly inquiry as she laughed gently to herself.

Jane bit her lips and her face flushed scarlet.  The cowardly thrust had not wounded her own heart.  It had only uncovered the love of the man who lay enshrined in its depths.  A sudden sense of the injustice done him arose in her mind and then her own helplessness in it all.

“I would give him everything I have, if I could,” she answered simply, all her insistency gone, the tears starting to her eyes.