The sad sweetness of the smile accompanying the words was as little like the wonderful white shining of last night as the lot cast for Hetty was like that of the deformed dwarf whose height of grotesque folly was attained when she loved—first, in dreams and in “drifting”—then, all unconsciously, in actual scenes and waking moments—one whose whole heart belonged to the woman who had “made her over,” to whom she owed life, brain, and soul! She was to live with them! Hetty must make her partaker of her every good. By force of long habit, Hester fell to planning the house the three would inhabit. She was herself—always helpless, never less a burden than now—a piece of rubbish in the pretty rooms, a clog upon domestic machinery—a barrier to social pleasure—the inadmissible third in the married _tête-à-tête_. She writhed impotently. More useless than a toy; more troublesome than a baby—uglier than the meanest insect that crawls—she must yet submit to the fate that fastened her upon the young lives of her custodians. “I doubt if I could even take my own life!” she meditated darkly. “In my fits of rage and despair, I used to threaten to roll my chair down the stairs and break my neck to ‘finish the job.’ I said it once to mamma. I wonder sometimes if that is the reason Tony puts up gates across the top of the stairs wherever we go? He says it is to keep baby Annie from tumbling down. I haven’t cared to die lately, but to-day I wish my soul had floated clean out of my body in that five minute make-believe under the pink tent of the apple tree, three months ago. “I suppose he will be coming here constantly, now. Hetty won’t belong to me anymore. I am very wicked! I am jealous of her with him, and of him with her! I am a spiteful, malicious, broken-backed toad! Oh, how I despise Hester Wayt! And I owe it all to _him_!” She glowered revengefully at the door her mother had left unclosed. Baby Annie was having a lovely hour with “dee papa.” He had not left his bed, but the nausea and sense of goneness with which he had awakened, were yielding to the administration of minute potions of opium by his wife, at stated intervals. A fit of delirium tremens, induced by the failure to “cool him off” _secundum artem_, had brought about Homer’s introduction to his nominal employer. Routed from his secret lodgings under the roof-tree at one o’clock of a winter morning, Hetty’s waif had first run for a doctor, and, pending his arrival, pinioned the raving patient with his sinewy arms until the man of intelligent measures took charge of the case. Mrs. Wayt had run no such risks since.