"I know ... times I felt that way about it too, but that was when I was older ... as if it sort of held us all together; like somebody who had belonged to us all and had died. Only it was me that died, the me that would have been if I hadn't been lame.... Well, I hadn't thought it out so far that first summer; I just hated it because it kept us from doing things like other people. You were fond of Ada Brown, I remember, and it was because I was lame and we were so poor and all, that you couldn't go with her and she got engaged to Jim Harvey. I hope you don't think I have a bad heart, Peter, but I was always glad that Ada didn't turn out very well. Every time I saw her getting homelier and kind of bedraggled like, I said to myself, well, I've saved Peter from that at any rate. I couldn't have borne it if she had turned out the kind of a person you ought to have married." "You shouldn't have worried, Ellen; very few men marry the first woman they are interested in." "There was a girl you used to write home about--at that boarding-house. I used to get you to write. I daresay you thought I was just curious. But I was trying to find out something that would make me perfectly sure she wasn't good enough for you. She was a typewriter, wasn't she?" "Something of that sort." "Well!" Ellen took him up triumphantly, "you wouldn't have wanted to be married to a typewriter _now!"_ "I never really thought of marrying one, Ellen. I'm sure everything has turned out for the best." "That's what I'm trying to tell you. You see I was determined it should turn out that way. I said, what was the use of being lame and being a burden to you unless there was something _meant_ by it. I'd have fretted dreadfully if I hadn't felt that there was something to come out of it. And it has come.... Peter, you'd rather I'd saved you for this than anything that might have happened?" "Much rather, Ellen." It had surprised him in the telling, to see how accurately his sister had gauged the worldly advantage of his marriage. If Eunice Goodward had been a piece of furniture, Ellen couldn't have appraised her better at her obvious worth: beauty and character and family and the mysterious cachet of society. Clarice had been at work there, too, he suspected. Miss Goodward fitted in Ellen's mind's eye into her brother's life and fortune as a picture into its frame. "I'm very glad you feel that way about it, Ellen," he said again; he was on the point of telling her about the House of Shining Walls. The material from which he had drawn its earliest furnishings lay all about them, the receding blue of the summer sky, the aged, arching apple boughs. The scent of the wilding rose came faintly in from the country road--suddenly his sister surprised him with a flash of rare insight.