It awoke nobody else under the parsonage roof-tree. Hester slept soundly beside her. She never slept quietly. In addition to the spinal disease which warped the poor girl’s figure she suffered from an affection of the throat that made her respiration in slumber a rattling snore, interrupted at regular intervals by a gurgle that sounded like strangulation. So audibly distressing was it that her father could not sleep within two rooms of her, and the healthy occupants of the intervening nursery complained that “nothing was done to break Hester of making such a racket. If she wanted to stop it she could.” Her young aunt and roommate knew better. Hester had shared her bed for almost nine years. Mrs. Wayt’s orphaned sister was but fourteen when she came to live in the parsonage, then situated in Cincinnati. It had been a hard winter with the pastor’s wife. While her mother lay dying in Ithaca, N. Y., her then only daughter, the first born of her flock, a beautiful, vivacious child of eight, met with the accident which crippled and dwarfed her for life. The telegram announcing Mrs. Alling’s illness was answered by one saying that Hester was at the point of death. She had just passed the first doubtful stage upon the return journey lifeward, when Hetty, in her new black frock, insisted upon relieving the grief-worn watcher over the wreck that could never be put together again. Lying in strange quarters in a strange town at the dreariest hour of the twenty-four, Hetty recalled that as the date when the load of care, now an integral part of herself, was first fastened upon her. She had before this likened it to a needle she had once, in childish wantonness, run under the bark of a young willow, and seen disappear gradually from view as the riven bark grew over it, until, at the end of a year, no vestige of the steel remained, except a ridge which was never smoothed away. She was not exactly penniless. The portion left her by her mother was judiciously invested by her guardian, and yielded her exactly four hundred dollars a year. It was transmitted promptly, quarterly, until she was of age, by which time she was so rooted and grounded in prudence that she continued to draw the like amount at equal periods. “It is enough to dress her,” Mrs. Wayt had said to her husband, in seeking his sanction to her offer of a home to one who stood alone in the world save for her sister, and an uncle who had lived in Japan for twenty years. “And she is welcome to her board—is she not, Percy, dear?” “Welcome, dear love? Can you ask the question with regard to your only sister—poor motherless lamb! While we have a roof between us and the sky and a crust of bread between us and starvation, she shall share both. Let _me_ write the letter!”