and Mary were happy or were despondent in exact accord with young Mrs. Lawrence’s mood.  If the great lady were ungracious, were cold, or dissatisfied, Lydia trembled, for the little sum she earned by teaching was more than two-thirds of all that she and Mary had.  If Mrs. Lawrence were in a happier frame of mind, Lydia brightened, and gratefully accepted the occasional flowers or candy, that meant to both sisters so much more than mere carnations or mere chocolates.

But if Lydia’s life was limited, what of Mary, whose brain was so active that merely to read of great and successful deeds tortured her like a pain?  Just to have a little share of the world’s work, just to dig and water the tiniest garden, just to be able to fill a glass for herself with water, or to make a pudding, or to wash up the breakfast dishes, would have been to her the most exquisite delight in the world.

As it was she lay still, reading, sometimes writing a letter, or copying something for Lydia, always eager for a game of “Halma” or “Parchesi,” a greater part of the time out of pain, and for a certain part of the twenty-four hours tortured by the slow-creeping agonies that waited for her like beasts in the darkness of every night.  Sometimes Susan, rousing from the deep delicious sleep that always befriended her, would hear in the early morning, rarely earlier than two o’clock or later than four, the hoarse call in the front room, “Lyddie!  Lyddie!” and the sleepy answer and stumbling feet of the younger sister, as she ran for the merciful pill that would send Miss Mary, spent with long endurance, into deep and heavenly sleep.  Susan had two or three times seen the cruel trial of courage that went before the pill, the racked and twisting body, the bitten lip, the tortured eyes on the clock.

Twice or three times a year Miss Mary had very bad times, and had to see her doctor.  Perhaps four times a month Miss Lydia beamed at Susan across the breakfast table, “No pill last night!” These were the variations of the invalid’s life.

Susan, while Mary considered her moves to-night, studied the room idly, the thousand crowded, useless little possessions so dear to the sick; the china statuettes, the picture post-cards, the photographs and match-boxes and old calendars, the dried “whispering-grass” and the penwipers.  Her eyes reached an old photograph; Susan knew it by heart.  It represented an old-fashioned mansion, set in a sweeping lawn, shaded by great trees.  Before one wing an open barouche stood, with driver and lackey on the box, and behind the carriage a group of perhaps ten or a dozen colored girls and men were standing on the steps, in the black-and-white of house servants.  On the wide main steps of the house were a group of people, ladies in spreading ruffled skirts, a bearded, magnificent old man, young men with heavy mustaches of the sixties, and some small children in stiff white.  Susan knew that the heavy big baby on a lady’s lap was Lydia, and that