As for Seth, the youngest of the brothers, it is to be doubted if she would have thought of him at all, had he not come in at the moment. He had been down to the village to get some black clothes which the tailor had constructed on short notice for him, and he, too, passed through the sitting room to the stairs with the serious look and the dead silence which the awful presence imposes. Then she did think of him for a moment, as she stood warming her fingers over the bald, flat top of the stove--for though bright and warm enough outside, the air was still chilly in these great barns of rooms. Seth was indisputably the handsomest of all the Fairchilds, even handsomer than she remembered his father to have been--a tall, straight, broadshouldered youth, who held his head well up and looked everybody in the face with honest hazel eyes. He had the Richardson complexion, a dusky tint gained doubtless from all those Dutch intermarriages of which poor Cicely used to make so much, but his brown hair curled much as Lemuel’s used to curl, only not so effeminately, and his temper was as even as his father’s had been, though not so submissive or weak. His hands were rough and coarse from the farm work, and his walk showed familiarity with ploughed ground, but still he had, in his way, a more distinguished air than either Albert or John had ever had. Looking him over, a stranger would have been surprised that his aunt should have left him out of her thoughts of the family’s future--or that, once pausing to consider him, she should have dropped the idea so swiftly. But so it was. Miss Sabrina felt cold and aggrieved toward Albert, and she came as near hating John as a deeply devout woman safely could. She simply took no account of Seth at all, as she would have expressed it. To her he was a quiet, harmless sort of youngster, who worked prettily steadily on the farm, and got on civilly with people. She understood that he was very fond of reading, but that made no special impression on her. If she had been asked, she would undoubtedly have said that Seth was her favorite nephew--but she had never dreamed of regarding him as a possible restorer of the family glories. “Is yer oven hot enough?” she asked Alvira in the kitchen, a minute later. “If they’s anything I _dew_ hate, it’s a soggy undercrust.” “I guess I kin manage a batch o’ pies by this time,” returned the hired-girl with a sniff. Through some unexplained process of reasoning, Alvira was with the Fairchilds as against the Richardsons, but she was first of all for herself, against the whole human race.