Nor was he going to die. There was deeper knowledge of life yet for the woman by him to learn. Afterward, Doctor Ransome drove Alexina home in his buggy, where she and the voluble, excited Katy packed some things for Harriet. "And Miss Harriet never to let us hear a word, and Maggie and me never closing our eyes all the night, Miss Alexina," Katy said. And Harriet Blair a person usually so observant and punctilious about everything! "And Mr. Blair, he asked where you were, Miss Harriet and you, when he came, and then he dressed and went to the party he was going to take you to, as if nothing had happened. And the Father came this morning and talked, but Mr. Blair hardly said a word, and when they left the priest went one way and Mr. Blair he went the other." Doctor Ransome came in his buggy and took Alexina back. On reaching the infirmary they found that Major Rathbone's sister from Bardstown, who had been sent for, had arrived. Alexina had not known that he had a sister until she found her in the room next to the Major's, with Harriet. She was childlike and small and was looking at Harriet, helpless and frightened. She was, it proved, twenty-three years old, and a widow with two children. "And Stevie takes care of us," she explained. "Stevie" was the Major; "us" was herself and the babies. She had brought both the babies. "I couldn't leave them and come, you know," she said. One of them lay on the bed, asleep, a little chap four years old, his coat unfastened, his hair tumbled. The other, the younger, asleep too, lay on the mother's knee, Harriet regarding him. He was aquiline, lean and handsome, baby as he was, like a little deer hound. "His name is Stevie," said Stephen's sister. Harriet looked up from the child to the mother, almost jealously. "Then he is mine, too; I have some part in him too, since his name is Stephen." CHAPTER FOUR For two months Austen Blair and his niece lived on in the big house. Alexina wondered if her uncle were not different from other people, for it must be the abnormal human who would not ask one question about his sister; mere curiosity must have demanded that much, Alexina thought, having a lively curiosity herself. To be sure, Aunt Harriet, from Uncle Austen's standpoint, had outraged every convention to which they had been bred; she had married a man between whom and her family there had been bitterest enmity, between whom and her brother there had been personal encounter; she had gone from her brother's roof to be married in a Catholic institution, by a Catholic priest. It almost made Alexina laugh when she summed up the enormity of the offending. She gloried in it herself; she adored Aunt Harriet and loved her for it. But the fact that her uncle could thus ignore the whole subject made it harder for Alexina to go to him about a matter which had arisen concerning herself.