Singularly enough the sight of her satisfaction stirred her brother to instant indignation. Up to this moment a sense of grievance had been upper-most. Now he found himself shaken by hot anger. The instinct of the male to dominate, outlasting the strength which sustains and protects, spurred him on to have his way with her, to master this madness which threatened the peace of his life. "Persis," he began in a loud angry voice, "what's the meaning of this piece of tom-foolishness?" She opened her eyes and looked at him. After her two weeks' absence, their longest separation in twenty years, she saw him almost as a stranger would have done, a slight, undersized man with a bulging forehead which told of nature's generous endowments, and the weak chin, explaining his failure to measure up to the promise of his youth. His disheveled hair and burning eyes gave an unprepossessing touch to the picture. But the maternal feeling, always uppermost where her brother was concerned, had been intensified by the children's advent. Persis felt for the moment the indulgent disapproval of a mother toward an unreasonable child. "Why, Joel!" Her voice, with its new depth and richness, caressed the name it uttered. "What's foolish about it?" The gentleness of her answer misled him. He felt a sudden thrilling conviction of his ability to bring her to terms. "What's foolish about it? What ain't foolish, you'd better say. Looks to me as if you'd taken leave of your senses. Filling up the house with pauper brats." The blood went out of her face. The smile lingered, but it had become merely a muscular contraction, like the smile on dead lips. The soul had left it. "Yes," she said steadily. "It's true they're poor. But it's not for you to fling that in their faces. A man who's lived on his sister's earnings for twenty years." He was dumb for a moment, wincing under the taunt but lacking words to answer. He was not without reasonable qualities, and reason told him he had taken the wrong track. The change in his voice when he spoke again would have seemed ludicrous had she been in a mood to be amused. "See here, Persis, you've got a chance now to take things easy. You've worked hard," he admitted patronizingly, "and you've earned a right to enjoy the rest of your life. Now, see how silly 'twould be to saddle yourself with looking after a pack of children. It's no joke, I can tell you; bringing up five young ones, nursing 'em through measles and whooping-cough and the Lord knows what, and never being sure whether they'll turn out good or bad. Maybe you think I'm prejudiced, but I'll bet you anything you like that at this minute half Clematis is wondering whether you're clean crazy or what." Under his conciliatory address her first anger had cooled. A little half-contemptuous smile curled her lips.