could not move. How long, long ago it all was! Yet how close they were, especially Basil, who had been of all most vivid, most bright.

Presently, moved by an irresistible impulse, she left her chair by the window and climbed the stairs into the low-pitched third story. There she laid her hand upon a door. She desired intensely to go in; the touch of the knob restored to her an old mood of grief, the phase in which one feels that seeking, importuning, one must find. Basil was here; his wide, bright gaze sought her eyes, as she often fancied, with reproach. All dead persons seemed to Mrs. Lister to look like that; her father did, as she remembered some little service unrendered, some command forgotten. Basil's gaze was like his father's, yet different. He seemed to reproach, not his sister, but his Creator for having laid him low, banishing him from the sunshine when his contemporaries still had years of life before them.

This was his room; here he had slept and idled and whistled and sung; here had been unpacked and put away his belongings sent home after he was dead; here lingered still an odor of disinfectants and still more subtly an odor of tobacco, not approved of in the Lister house; here were his pens and pencils and his books, shabby little editions of Greek plays, lined and annotated, which he carried about with him. Here he had sat by the window, indifferent to heat and cold, alone, doing, alas! nothing. Surely if she entered she would find him, would hear him speak, would see him smile! Surely—

Mrs. Lister took her hand from the knob and went down the steps. This was Richard's Commencement Day; it was wrong to give her mind free course in the region which invited. Basil was at peace; must be at peace, nothing could disturb him. He was gone almost entirely from human recollection. The old fear that the world might come to know about him, that things might be "found out," was laid. She, too, must forget him; that was the only way to live. Dr. Lister had said, many years ago, that Basil's belongings should be destroyed; that this was the first step toward her recovery. But Dr. Lister spoke of him no more and to Richard he was a vague ghost. Changes in the faculty of the college, the death of old friends in the town had contributed to forgetfulness. Most of all, Mrs. Lister's own grief was of the variety which endures no mention of the dead and which creates the oblivion which it is likely most bitterly to resent. Basil was dead and forgotten.

CHAPTER II MOTHER AND DAUGHTER

In a little house overlooking the fields on the far side of Waltonville, where Mrs. Margie Bent, of Waltonville's middle class, lived with her daughter Eleanor, preparations for Commencement were in progress. The house was pale gray in color, and had about its little porch a mass of pink climbing roses with dark foliage and thick clusters of bloom. Before it lay a smooth lawn, and back of it a tiny garden, symmetrically divided by grass paths. There were no outbuildings, there was no stick or weed; the little establishment looked like a playhouse or the model for an architect's picture. One did not ascribe to its inhabitants any academic aspirations.

Waltonville was accustomed to think of the little house as "back of" the town. Yet the town was in a truer sense back of the little gray house, which looked out upon a wide sweep of open country. Before it the fields dipped in a long and beautiful slope, then rose a few miles away to a low range of blue hills. A part of the land was cultivated, but there remained many stretches of woodland, especially along a wandering stream whose silver course could be followed for a long distance, and from which rose mist, now in thick, obscuring masses, now in transparent vapor. Beyond the low hills was another higher range. Here and there in the pleasant valley were farmhouses and large barns whose dimensions and design were copied from the barns of Lancaster County not many miles away.

Within the little house was the same clean prettiness. The furniture was simple and plain and there was a great deal of exquisite hand-sewing; hem-stitching on the white curtains, heavy initials on the linen, and beautiful embroidery on Eleanor's clothes in the closets. In the little parlor stood a bookcase filled with handsome and well-chosen books, and in the dining-room there were both bookcase and desk, the latter now neatly closed.

Little Mrs. Bent was helping her tall daughter into the Commencement dress which she had made with her own unresting hands. Her fair hair curled about her forehead, her short upper lip made her look like a little girl, and her whole appearance was at once attractive and pathetic. Mrs. Scott, whose inquisitive spirit made her wish to know every one in Waltonville by sight and as much about each person as she could discover, said of Mrs. Bent that she looked and acted like a lady, though she was none. Thomasina Davis, whose kindly spirit made her judge her acquaintances with sympathy, said that she believed that Mrs. Bent was a good woman who had suffered cruelly. Thomasina remembered her perfectly as Margie Ginter, the daughter of the most unpleasant, sodden, law-breaking tavern-keeper Waltonville had ever had, but did not think evil of her on that account. She knew that Margie had been light as thistledown, too easily pleased, too careless of the company she kept, entirely too free with her smiles, and a source of anxiety to the mothers of the young men of the town and to those who had the well-being of the college boys at heart; but she did not believe any of the serious accusations made against her by the older women; had not believed them when they were made and did not believe them now that they were occasionally recalled.

Margie had left Waltonville long ago with her father for another tavern in another State, and after a few years had returned with a married name and with a little girl whom she called "Nellie," and with means for very simple living. Whether her income had its source in the ill-gotten gains of her father or in the property of a deceased husband, or in some other less creditable source, Waltonville did not know. A few persons speculated about her when she returned, but she and her little daughter were soon accepted and ignored.

If there had been any one to compare Margie Ginter with Mrs. Bent, he would scarcely have believed her to be the same person. Margie Ginter had lived indifferently in a miserable tavern; Mrs. Bent conducted her little house with the most exquisite tidiness, and maintained therein the most perfect order. Her linens were less elegant than Mrs. Lister's, but they were no less beautifully laundered, no less elaborately marked. Margie had longed for constant company, and a succession of the most idle of pleasures; Mrs. Bent shrank even from the back-door calls of her neighbors. Margie had been confident, assured in all her motions, and almost impertinent in her glances at those whose disapproval she surmised; Mrs. Bent was humble, even frightened. Margie had never gone to church, but Mrs. Bent took a little side pew in the college church and sat there at each service. To Margie had come some mighty metamorphosis, changing her instincts, changing her very soul, as completely as a human body could have changed its position at a "Right-about face." The process had not been easy; it had written pathetic lines in the countenance which had once expressed only light-heartedness.

The tall daughter whom she was helping into her embroidered Commencement dress was as dark as her mother was fair and as direct of gaze as her mother was timid. Her gray eyes were singularly clear and bright; they held the glance so that her other