Across the table little Pell was eating delicately, pretending to be a bird. Now and then his stepmother turned away from the younger children to scold him about his fastidious appetite, or his odd manner of using his knife and fork, as if they were a superior kind of chopsticks. Her tone was not harsh. It was no sharper indeed than the one she used to her own children; yet, whenever she spoke to him, I felt rather than saw that he winced and shrank away from her. The child’s nerves were overstrung, I could tell that just by watching him with his stepmother; and to her, who could see nothing that was not directly before her eyes, his sensitiveness appeared deliberate perversity. Yet he was an attractive child in spite of his elfin ways. If he could only find the sympathy and understanding he needed so desperately, I felt that he might become very lovable. Though I was sorry for the child then, I had barely touched the edge of the passion which presently filled my heart. The hardest hour of all, and one of the most trying moments in my life, came when we passed into the library, and Mrs. Blanton summoned the children to bed. The younger children, already nodding, obeyed without protest; but when it came to Pell’s turn to kiss his father good-night, he began to shake and whimper with terror. For a minute I did not understand; then turning to Cousin Pelham, I asked, with a sympathy so acute that it stabbed like a knife, “Is Pell afraid of the dark?” Cousin Pelham, sunk in the softest old leather chair, was beyond the sound of my voice; but his wife answered immediately in her firm and competent tone. “We are trying to break him of it. It would be dreadful for his father’s son to be a coward.” “Does he sleep in the nursery?” “He used to, but we had to move his bed across the hall because he kept the other children awake. He gets, or pretends to get, the most ridiculous notions into his head, and he carries on so that the other children don’t get any sleep when they are in the room with him.” “Where does he stay now?” “In the spare room next to yours. We moved him there a few weeks ago, and you would think from the way he behaved that we were sending him to his grave.” “But doesn’t that seem the wrong way, to frighten a nervous child into hysterics?” At this she turned on me the most exasperating force in the universe, impregnable common sense. “We’ve got to break him of it,” she retorted, “or he will be a baby all his life.”