In the distance a machine stopped and deposited a woman whose utmost years might have been guessed as sixty, who walked across the lawn as lightly as a well-cared-for woman of forty, and whose actual calendar age was sixty-eight. Martha rose from her seat to greet her, in the hearty Hawaiian way, arms about, lips on lips, faces eloquent and bodies no less eloquent with sincereness and frank excessiveness of emotion. And it was “Sister Bella,” and “Sister Martha,” back and forth, intermingled with almost incoherent inquiries about each other, and about Uncle This and Brother That and Aunt Some One Else, until, the first tremulousness of meeting over, eyes moist with tenderness of love, they sat gazing at each other across their teacups. Apparently, they had not seen nor embraced for years. In truth, two months marked the interval of their separation. And one was sixty-four, the other sixty-eight. But the thorough comprehension resided in the fact that in each of them one-fourth of them was the sun-warm, love-warm heart of Hawaii. The children flooded about Aunt Bella like a rising tide and were capaciously hugged and kissed ere they departed with their nurses to the swimming beach. “I thought I’d run out to the beach for several days—the trades had stopped blowing,” Martha explained. “You’ve been here two weeks already,” Bella smiled fondly at her younger sister. “Brother Edward told me. He met me at the steamer and insisted on running me out first of all to see Louise and Dorothy and that first grandchild of his. He’s as mad as a silly hatter about it.” “Mercy!” Martha exclaimed. “Two weeks! I had not thought it that long.” “Where’s Annie?—and Margaret?” Bella asked. Martha shrugged her voluminous shoulders with voluminous and forgiving affection for her wayward, matronly daughters who left their children in her care for the afternoon. “Margaret’s at a meeting of the Out-door Circle—they’re planning the planting of trees and hibiscus all along both sides of Kalakaua Avenue,” she said. “And Annie’s wearing out eighty dollars’ worth of tyres to collect seventy-five dollars for the British Red Cross—this is their tag day, you know.” “Roscoe must be very proud,” Bella said, and observed the bright glow of pride that appeared in her sister’s eyes. “I got the news in San Francisco of Ho-o-la-a’s first dividend. Remember when I put a thousand in it at seventy-five cents for poor Abbie’s children, and said I’d sell when it went to ten dollars?” “And everybody laughed at you, and at anybody who bought a share,” Martha nodded. “But Roscoe knew. It’s selling to-day at twenty-four.” “I sold mine from the steamer by wireless—at twenty even,” Bella continued. “And now Abbie’s wildly dressmaking. She’s going with May and Tootsie to Paris.” “And Carl?” Martha queried. “Oh, he’ll finish Yale all right—” “Which he would have done anyway, and you _know_ it,” Martha charged, lapsing charmingly into twentieth-century slang.