had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot in which she had grown. She was no longer penniless, she was no longer needed, but she was crushed. The power of revolt was the gift of youth. Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual resistance--words without passion, acts without abandonment. At times she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the chest, which her mirror revealed to her. The period was full of woman's advancement--a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her--yet she had taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved. She had read countless novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her sex, but beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that the newer woman who grasped successfully the right to live, was as her elder sister who had petitioned merely for the privilege to love. The modern heroine could still charm even after she had ceased to desire to. Neither in the new fiction nor in the old was there a place for the unhappy woman who desired to charm but could not; she remained what she had always been--a tragic perversion of nature which romance and realism conspired to ignore. Women in novels had revolted against life as passionately as she--but one and all they had revolted in graceful attitudes and with abundant braids of hair. A false front not only extinguished sentiment--it put an end to rebellion. "Miss Kesiah, dar's Marse Reuben in de hall en he sez he'd be moughty glad ef'n you'd step down en speak a wud wid 'im." "In a moment, Abednego. I must take off my things." Withdrawing the short jet-headed pins from her bonnet with a hurried movement, she stabbed them into the hard round pincushion on her bureau, and after throwing a knitted cape over her shoulders, went down the wide staircase to where Reuben awaited her in the hall. As she walked she groped slightly and peered ahead of her with her nervous, short-sighted gaze. At the foot of the staircase, the old man was standing in a patient attitude, resting upon his wooden leg, which was slightly in advance of his sound one. His fine bearded face might have been the face of a scholar, except for its roughened skin and the wistful, dog-like look in the eyes. In response to Kesiah's greeting, he explained that he had come at once to acknowledge the gift of the overcoat and to "pay his respects." "I am glad you like it," she answered, and because her heart was swelling with kindness, she stammered and grew confused while the anxious frown deepened between her eyebrows. A morbid horror of making herself ridiculous prevented her always from making herself understood. "It will be very useful to me, ma'am, when I am out of doors in bad weather," he replied, wondering if he had offended her by his visit.