“Oh, her mother was mother’s youngest sister, and idol. Mother was perfectly insane about her. Then she married this Radway, and everybody said it was a great match, brilliant young doctor and all that. But the brilliant young doctor showed he hadn’t a grain of sense in his head. He discovered some new germ or other and then he went to work experimenting on it, and two or three times was saved from death just by the skin of his teeth. Finally he let them inoculate him with the thing, just to observe its workings. He knew he was running a great risk when he did it, and yet he was ass enough to go ahead. When he died they sold the house and a good deal of the furnishings. Mother had some of the things up in the attic a long time. I don’t know what became of them. Sold I suppose, perhaps to get that fox fur. Mother was just daffy on that girl. She always wanted a daughter you know. And after Aunt Helen died,--she didn’t live many months after her husband, just faded away you know--why mother did everything for Joyce.” “Well, I think she did more than she had any right to do for just a niece,” said Nannette scornfully. “It’s time you had your innings. I think your mother should have thought of her own son and her grandchildren, and not lavished fox furs on a mere relation. She just spoiled Joyce. She thinks she has to live in luxury, and it’s going to be very hard to break her in to working for her living.” The clock was striking twelve before Nannette began to undress, and now and then she would cast an anxious eye out of the window and wonder how long the erring girl’s nerve would hold out, or whether she had really dared go to some neighbor’s and stay all night. If she had what could they do? Finally Gene got up from his reading chair and went downstairs to see if all the doors were locked, he said; but in reality he went softly out the kitchen door and walked down to the garage with slow, careful tread, stopping to listen, every minute or two. But no sound reached his ear save the dreamy notes of a tree toad. The little gray clouds drifting through the sky were hiding the moon and making the back yard quite dark. Somehow a vision of his mother’s face came to him, that last day when she had called him to the bed side and reminded him that she left Joyce as a sacred trust to his care. She told him that of course he would understand the home was always hers and something like reproach came and stood before his self-centred, satisfied soul and gave him strange uneasiness. He stepped quietly into the garage and looked around in the darkness. There was no car as yet, but he meant to purchase one the minute the estate was settled up. He felt sure there would be plenty of money to do a number of the things to the house that he had already planned. It was not really a garage, though he had called it that ever since he came home to live with his mother, it was only the old barn with a new door.