Minnie looked at it very near to, covering all but the face with her hand.  “Dan, she’s lovely!” she cried, and Dan’s heart leaped into his throat As he gratefully met his sister’s eyes.

“You’ll like her, Min.”

Eunice took the photograph from her for a second scrutiny.  “She’s certainly very stylish.  Rather a beak of a nose, and a little too bird—­like on the whole.  But she isn’t so bad.  Is it like her?” she asked with a glance at her father.

“I might say—­after looking,” he replied.

“True!  I didn’t know but Dan had shown it to you as soon as you met.  He seemed to be in such a hurry to let us all know.”

The father said, “I don’t think it flatters her,” and he looked at it more carefully.  “Not much of her mother there?” he suggested to Dan.

“No, sir; she’s more like her father.”

“Well, after all this excitement, I believe I’ll have another cup of tea, and take something to eat, if Miss Pasmer’s photograph doesn’t object,” said Eunice, and she replenished her cup and plate.

“What coloured hair and eyes has she, Dan?” asked Minnie.

He had to think so as to be exact.  “Well, you might say they were black, her eyebrows are so dark.  But I believe they’re a sort of greyish-blue.”

“Not an uncommon colour for eyes,” said Eunice, “but rather peculiar for hair.”

They got to making fun of the picture, and Dan told them about Alice and her family; the father left them at the table, and then came back with word from Dan’s mother that she was ready to see him.

XXX.

By eight o’clock in the evening the pain with which every day began for Mrs. Mavering was lulled, and her jarred nerves were stayed by the opiates till she fell asleep about midnight.  In this interval the family gathered into her room, and brought her their news and the cheer of their health.  The girls chattered on one side of her bed, and their father sat with his newspaper on the other, and read aloud the passages which he thought would interest her, while she lay propped among her pillows, brilliantly eager for the world opening this glimpse of itself to her shining eyes.  That was on her good nights, when the drugs did their work, but there were times when they failed, and the day’s agony prolonged itself through the evening, and the sleep won at last was a heavy stupor.  Then the sufferer’s temper gave way under the stress; she became the torment she suffered, and tore the hearts she loved.  Most of all, she afflicted the man who had been so faithful to her misery, and maddened him to reprisals, of which he afterward abjectly repented.  Her tongue was sharpened by pain, and pitilessly skilled to inculpate and to punish; it pierced and burned like fire but when a good day came again she made it up to the victims by the angelic sweetness and sanity which they felt was her real self; the cruelty was only the mask of her suffering.