BERNERS, the merchant and horseman, had for a good many years been disappointed and hurt by the thought that his family was not to carry on after his death but in his old age had grown cheerful about the matter. “We aren’t so much. It doesn’t matter. I dare say the sun will come up mornings and the moon at night when there are no more Berners in Illinois, or anywhere else, for that matter.” As a child the boy Alonzo was always sickly. “We’ve always been thinking he’d die, about twice every year, but you see he hasn’t quite done it yet,” the old man said softly. Hallie, the daughter of the house, was five years older than her brother and was devoted to him. After seeing them together one understood that she could never have married. It was just a thing that couldn’t have happened. One thought of her as saying to herself: “Marriage is too intimate. I am not made for intimate relations.” The idea of Hallie Berners held in a man’s arms was for some obscure reason monstrous and yet how affectionate she was! There was a sense in which her brother and father were babes in her charge, babes never touched by her hands or her lips but constantly caressed by her thoughts. She was a tall rather stern-looking woman with graying hair, large strong hands and quiet gray eyes and she was very shy. Her shyness expressed itself in severity and when she was much touched she grew silent and almost haughty in her bearing. It was as though she were saying to herself: “Look out now! If you are not careful you will let something precious escape you.” The son Alonzo was a man of thirty-five with a little black mustache, thin features, small delicate hands and thick, black hair. As a young man he had gone away to an eastern college but a desperate illness had compelled him to come home almost at once and he had not again tried getting out from under his sister’s care, only leaving the family roof when he crept away for the brief periods of drunkenness that gave him a temporary means of escape out of his house of pain. He stayed at home and on fair days sometimes rode about town and the surrounding country behind an old black horse that belonged to the family or sat in the garden under the apple trees talking with friends who came to see him. In a large room in the house where he stayed on dull or cold days there were a couch, a fireplace and many books on shelves built into the walls.