But the child coming--their child? Perhaps the child would make it right. When it came, Emily would love her child? Perhaps she did; she never talked about it afterwards, and Alexina never saw her with it; it died in the summer, soon after its coming. When she did see the two again, her uncle and Emily, on her own return to Louisville in the late fall, the embarrassing playfulness had left Uncle Austen. Perhaps the steely coldness of his manner was worse. Had Emily dared--even in her mourning there was something about her that was reckless. But she did not dare. She was twenty-two and he was fifty-two, and she was to live afraid of him, to see him an old man, for he is living now. CHAPTER TWELVE Harriet laughed at Alexina's wonder over her. "It took me a time to realize that hospitality means the incidental oftener than the invited," she confessed. "My guests, you know, Alexina, were formally asked, and the other would have fretted me. That was why, I suppose, I had no intimates." Harriet never knew, it would seem, these days, whether the Judge, the Colonel, Father Ryan, the man from the office chatting in the library with the Major, one or all, were going to stay for supper or were not; yet she had come to the place where she could smile in serene and genuine welcome, the while everybody moved up and the coloured housemaid slipped in an extra chair and plate. And she only laid a hand on the spoon with which little Stevie hammered his plate. "I'd take it away and spank him myself, you know," confided Louise, Stevie's mother, to Alexina; "I do spank William." But all of life seemed to be moving for Harriet with serenity. Every trivial happening was swallowed up in the joy that death had spared her her husband. And the Major, whatever the agony, the horror, preceding the acceptation of a maimed life, had not lost the vital grace of humour. Life flowed in and out of the Rathbone home with him for centre as it had used to do in and out of his office. The room where he sat amid his papers and books was a rallying place because the strong will and personality of the man in the wheeled chair made it so. "He's been meaning for years to do a series of guerrilla articles a magazine has wanted of him, and now he's at them," said Harriet, "and he has given in this far, in his stiff-necked pride, that he's bought an interest in the paper for me, and it keeps him in touch and absorbed." The Major had been watching Alexina. At the end of several days' observations he leaned back in his chair and addressed her. His eyes were humorous. "There's an encouraging promise about you, Alexina," he informed her. Then he caressed his lean chin with his lean, smooth hand. "A promise that gives me hope. You've laughed at my jokes since you've been here, and not from mere politeness either. Now, Harriet smiles out of the goodness of her heart because she thinks she ought to."