“If you wish to hear my story,” she said, “sit here and I will tell it to you. My good husband doesn’t like me to talk of it, but my sorrow gets pent in me and tears me, which is what he doesn’t understand. I’ll be better for telling you the strange tale.” There was a rude bench beneath a fine sour-wood tree, and Azalea, sitting Turk-wise at one end so that she might face her companion, prepared to give her attention to the “strange tale”—and she thrilled as she did so, for she loved strange tales with a great love. CHAPTER VI LITTLE BROTHER “My father,” said Mrs. Rowantree with her delicate Irish accent, “was a gentleman—a scholar and a gentleman.” She paused a moment in that little dramatic way of hers and then went on. “But my mother was a cottager’s daughter, very sweet and lovely to see, but lacking the fine ways of himself. He gave up his friends for her sake, and they left the village where they were known and went to live in Dublin where my father made a living by writing for the newspapers and reviews. I was born the second year of their marriage, and seven years later my little brother David came into the world.” She paused again, but this time because there was a tightening in her throat which would not let her go on. “David,” she said, “was the finest baby I ever laid my eyes on, and I’ve had some fine ones of my own. He was a treasure from the first, but the older he grew the nicer he became, till, when he was three years of age, he was the pride of the neighborhood. People stopped my mother on the street for the privilege of looking at him. He had laughing black eyes and curly black hair, and the oddest little turns to his baby talk that ever were heard. Oh, we were so happy with him—so wrapped up in him. Indeed, you’d have looked well through Dublin before finding a home equal to our own for contentment. My father was getting some little fame for his writing, and my mother no longer had to slave for us the way she did at first. “Then, just as we were at our happiest, father came home with a chill. I well remember it. We were watching for him at the window, David and mother and I, and we had a meat pie because of his liking for it, and we had taught David to say ‘Four and Twenty Blackbirds.’ Oh, we were counting on such a happy evening! But when dad came in, he did not speak to us for the anguish that was on him, and mother got him in his bed, and he never got out of it again.” “Oh, me!” said Azalea softly. A little silence fell in which Mary Cecily Rowantree locked and unlocked her thin, nervous fingers in a way of her own.