"And I was ten. Well, I'm not blaming you, and I've done what I was forced to--but keep your confounded books out of my sight, that's all I ask. Is that mother calling?" Cynthia bent her ear. "I thought Lila was with her, but I'll go at once. Be sure to change your clothes, dear, before she touches you." "Hadn't I better chop a little kindling-wood before supper?" "No--no, not to-night. Go and dress, while I send Uncle Boaz for the wine." She entered the house with a hurried step, and Christopher, after an instant's hesitation, passed to the back, and, taking off his clumsy boots, crept softly up the creaking staircase to his little garret room in the loft. Ten minutes later he came down again, wearing a decent suit of country-made clothes, with the dust washed from his face, and his hair smoothly brushed across his forehead. In the front hall he took a white rosebud from a little vase of Bohemian glass and pinned it carefully in the lapel of his coat. Then, before entering, he stood for a moment silent upon the threshold of the lamplighted room. In a massive Elizabethan chair of blackened oak a stately old lady was sitting straight and stiff, with her useless legs stretched out upon an elaborately embroidered ottoman. She wore a dress of rich black brocade, made very full in the skirt, and sleeves after an earlier fashion, and her beautiful snow-white hair was piled over a high cushion and ornamented by a cap of fine thread lace. In her face, which she turned at the first footstep with a pitiable, blind look, there were the faint traces of a proud, though almost extinguished, beauty--traces which were visible in the impetuous flash of her sightless eyes, in the noble arch of her brows, and in the transparent quality of her now yellowed skin, which still kept the look of rare porcelain held against the sunlight. On a dainty, rose-decked tray beside her chair there were the half of a broiled chicken, a thin glass of port, and a plate of buttered waffles; and near her high footstool a big yellow cat was busily lapping a saucer of new milk. As Christopher went up to her, she stretched out her hand and touched his face with her sensitive fingers. "Oh, if I could only see you," she said, a little peevishly. "It is twenty years since I looked at you, and now you are taller than your father was, you say. I can feel that your hair is light, like his and like Lila's, too, since you are twins." A pretty, fragile woman, who was wrapping a shawl about the old lady's feet, rose to her full height and passed behind the Elizabethan chair." Just a shade lighter than mine, mother," she responded; "the sun makes a difference, you know; he is in the sun so much without a hat." As she stood with her delicate hands clasped above the fancifully carved grotesques upon the chair-back, her beauty shone like a lamp against the smoke-stained walls.