Old Mrs. Melrose was going to see her daughter Alice, who was Mrs. Christopher Liggett, because Alice was an invalid. It had been only a few years after Alice's most felicitous marriage, a dozen years ago, when an accident had laid the lovely and brilliant woman upon the bed of helplessness that she might never leave again. There was no real reason why the spine should continue useless, the great specialists said, there was a hope--even a probability--that as Alice grew rested and strong, after the serious accident, she might find herself walking again. But Alice had been a prisoner for ten years now, and the mother and sister who idolized her feared that she would never again be the old dancing Alice and feared that she knew it. What Christopher Liggett feared they did not know. He insisted that Alice's illness was but temporary, and was tireless in his energetic pursuit of treatment for his wife. Everything must be hoped, and everything must be tried, and Alice's mother knew that one of the real crosses of her daughter's life was sorrowful pity for Chris's optimistic delusions. The young Liggetts had sold the old house of Christopher's father, an immense brownstone mansion a few squares away, and lived in a modern, flat-faced gray-stone house that rose five stories from the beautifully arranged basement entrance. There were stone benches at the entrance, and a great iron grill, and two potted trees, and the small square windows were leaded, and showed blossoming plants inside. The three long windows above gave upon a little-used formal drawing-room, with a Gothic fireplace of white stone at one end, and a dim jumble of rich colours and polished surfaces between that and the big piano at the other. The room at the back, on this floor, was an equally large and formal dining-room, gleaming with carved mahogany and fretted plate, used only on the rare occasions of a dinner-party. But on the floor above the gracious mistress of the house had her domain, and here there was enough beauty and colour to make the whole house live. The front room, cool all summer because it faced north, and warm all winter, because of the great open fireplace that augmented the furnace heat, was Alice's sitting-room; comfortable, beautiful, and exquisitely ordered. None of the usual clutter of the invalid was there. The fireplace was of plain creamy tiling, the rugs dull-toned upon a dark, polished floor. There were only two canvases on the dove-gray walls, and the six or seven photographs that were arranged together on the top of one of the low, plain, built-in bookcases, were framed alike. There were no meaningless vases, no jars or trays or plaques or ornaments in Alice's room. Her flowers she liked to see in shining glass bowls; her flat-topped desk was severely bare.