"This is a thousand times better than Ugo's boards and barrel-staves," said Esmay, triumphantly, and transferred the fuel to the hearth, where it presently burst into a cheerful flame. "There are three or four boxes of the stuff in the cellar, enough to last us all winter. Now for the lamp." On the mantel-piece stood a shallow dish containing a small quantity of cotton-seed oil and a piece of lampwick. Esmay took down the vessel and inspected it with a calculating eye. "It will last until bedtime," she announced, and lit it with a spill of paper. Nanna looked at her half-sister questioningly, but did not offer to speak. She had never seen Esmay just like this, and the change was especially noticeable after the silence and apathy of the past months. Her thoughts travelled back to the human link that had united them for so long--the woman whom each had called mother, although to Nanna it had been only a step-relationship. How impossible it had once seemed that there could be any new adjustment of life's machinery; how difficult the realization that nature is accustomed to settle these matters in her own time and way, and invariably does so! Yet here was Esmay suddenly returned to herself, moving about, alert and eager, knitting her brows over the one important problem of the moment, the question of supper. "You'll have to make out with the firelight for a little while," said Esmay, picking up the rude lamp. "But you won't mind, dear?" She stooped, kissed her sister, and was gone again. The elder woman felt her eyes brimming saltily. The girl, so far as years were concerned, might almost have been her daughter, since Nanna had been both wife and widow at seventeen. For all that, the sisterly relation was the true one between them; they were of the same strong breed, even if Esmay were only in half a daughter of the Doomsmen. Nanna had never been able to forget that her father's second wife had been of the blood of the despised House People. In spite of herself she had learned to love the dead Elena; she adored Esmay as a part of herself. A primitive emotion, but then Nanna was the elemental woman.