The House of Fulfilment. George Madden Martin

and sometimes sighed, while he—

      At ten o’clock Harriet rolled her work together and said good-night, ascending the crimson-carpeted stairway with the unhurried movement of an Olympian goddess; that is, if an Olympian goddess could have been so genuinely above concern about it.

      Her room, a front one on the second floor, had a look of spaciousness and exquisite order. She moved about, adjusting a shade, setting a gas-bracket at some self-imposed angle of correctness, giving the sheets of the opened bed a touch of adjustment.

      It was the price paid for the free exercise of individuality. Already, at twenty-six, ways were becoming habits.

      These things arranged, she passed to the adjoining room, from to-night given to Alexina. Turning up the gas, Harriet glanced about at Nelly’s disposition of things, then moved to the bed.

      Whatever were the emotions called forth by the relaxed little form, softly and regularly breathing against a battered doll, or by the essentially babyish face with the fine, flaxen hair damp and clinging about the forehead, the Blairs were people to whom restraint was second nature. Whatever Harriet felt showed only in solicitude for the child who had thrown aside all cover. But as she drew the sheet and light blanket up, her hand touched the smoothness of a bared little limb. It brought embarrassment. She had but once before touched the bareness of another’s body, and that her mother’s, and in death.

      Was it shame, this surging of strange hotness through her?

      The refuge of a Blair was always action. She stepped to the bay of the room and drew the shutters against the night-wind.

      Between the windows stood the bureau. Harriet paused, arrested by a daguerreotype in a velvet case open upon it. The child must have left it there. She sat down and laying the picture on her knee, regarded it, her chin in her palm.

      It was the face of the father of the sleeping child, dead less than a year, for whom his sister was wearing this black trailing in folds about her.

      And looking on his face, she recalled another, exquisite in pallor, with shadowy lashes, the face of Molly, who ten months after Alexander’s death had married again; who not only married but gave up her child. Had it been the purpose of Alexander to test her for the child’s sake? She had been given her third and the child the same, with Austen as executor and guardian. In the event of Molly marrying again, she had been given choice. She might relinquish all right in the remaining third and keep the child, or by giving up the child could claim the portion. And the estate was large. In ten months Molly had chosen.

      And yet, thinking of these things, Harriet bade herself be just, chief tenet in the Blair creed. Was she so certain Alexander had been altogether unhappy in his marriage? May not compensations arise out of a man’s own nature if he cares for the woman? For Harriet no longer asked why her brother had married Molly. She knew, knew that the thing called love is stronger than reason, than life—some even claimed, than death. Not that she knew it of herself, this calm, poised Harriet, but, watching, she had seen its miracles.

      And out of this, Alexander may have drawn his compensation, for, stronger than the hourly friction of his daily life, stronger than the hurt of outraged conventionality, thrift, and pride, stronger than the jealousy which must have often assailed him, had not love survived in Alexander to the end, love that protected and concealed Molly’s failings from his own people?

      Suddenly, over Harriet swept the breath of roses coming into an open breakfast room and she saw a stern-lipped man lift, enfold a child-woman to him for a moment, and as fiercely put her from him and go out.

      Harriet, breathing quickly, put her brother’s picture back, and going to the bed, lifted the bar and drew the sheet again over the child. Then she stood looking down. What manner of little creature was this child of Alexander and Molly?

      Glancing about to assure herself all was in order, she put the light out, and, with hand outstretched against the darkness, moved to the door, when there swept over her again the vision of Molly clinging to Alexander, and again she felt the surrender of the man, the fierce closing of his arms, and again she was shaken by his passion.

      And even after she reached her room and sat down at her desk to the ledger of household accounts, it came over her, and she paused, her hand pressed to her hot cheek.

      But that a little creature had cried itself to sleep in the next room she did not dream. She would have cried herself, had she known it, she, to whom tears came seldom and hard. But she was a slow awakening soul, groping, and she did not know.

CHAPTER FOUR

       Table of Contents

      The next morning Harriet sat in Alexina’s room putting criss-cross initials on a pile of unmarked little garments. It was part of the creed that clothes be marked.

      Presently, as the child came to her aunt’s knee for a completed garment, Harriet laid a hand on the little shoulder. Demonstration came hard and brought a flush of embarrassment with it.

      “Alexina,” she said, “you haven’t mentioned your mother!”

      The child stood silent but there came a repeated swallowing in her throat while a slow red welled up over the little face.

      Harriet had a feeling of sudden liking and understanding. “You would rather—you prefer not?”

      The child nodded, but later, as if from some fear of appearing unresponsive, she brought an album from her trunk and spread it open on Harriet’s knee. She seemed a loyal small soul to her kinsfolk, mainly her mother’s people, and turning the leaves went through the enumeration.

      At one page—“Daddy,” she said.

      “Daddy” applied in a baby’s cadence to Alexander! Daddy! It was a revelation of that part of her brother’s life which Harriet had forgotten in accounting assets. “Daddy,” called fearlessly, with intonation unconsciously dear and appealing. And Alexander had been that to his child!

      There was no picture of Molly, but there was a torn and vacant space facing Alexander. Had the child removed one? She bore resentment then? Harriet had no idea how far a child of nine could comprehend and feel the situation.

      She would have been surprised at other things a child of nine can feel. If the routine of the house dragged dully to Alexina, Harriet never suspected it. The personal attention was detailed to Nelly, who divined more—Nelly, the freckle-faced, humorous-eyed house girl, taken from the Orphans’ Home and trained by Harriet’s mother. But, then, Nelly had been orphaned herself, and had known those first days following asylum consignment and perhaps had not forgot. Her sympathy expressed itself through the impersonal, the Blair training not having encouraged the other.

      “Such a be-yewtiful dress,” said she, laying out the clothes for her charge.

      Which was true; no child of Molly’s would have suffered for clothes, Molly loving them too well herself.

      “And such be-yewtiful slippers,” said Nelly, with Alexina in her lap, pulling up the little stocking and buttoning the strap about the ankle.

      Alexina’s hand held tight to Nelly’s hard, firm arm, steadying herself. Perhaps she divined the intention. “Can I come, too, when you go to set the table?” she asked.

      But Harriet never suspected. Nor again, that evening while she and Austen read under the lamp, did Harriet know that Alexina, standing at the open parlour window gazing at the children playing on the sidewalk, was fighting back passionate tears of an outraged love and a baffling sense of injustice.

      All at once a child’s treble came in from the pavement.

      “Can’t you come play?”

      Alexina turned, with backward look of eager inquiry to her aunt, who had come behind her to see who called.

      “As you please; go if you