His sister entered in a few moments.  She was nearly his age, but her faded face showed wrinkles only on the brow and about the eyes.  It wore a look of haunting youth; the expression of a woman who has grown old unwillingly, and still hopes, against reason, that youth is not a matter of a few years at the wrong end of life.  Her hair was fashionably arranged, but she was attired in a worn black silk, her only ornament a hair brooch.  Her hands were small and well kept, although the skin hung loose upon them, spotted with the moth-patches of age.  Her figure was erect, but stout.

“What is it, brother?” she asked softly, addressing the back of the autocrat’s head.

He wheeled about sharply.

“Why do you always come in like a cat?  Do you think those people will come to-day?  It’s raining cats and dogs.”

“Certainly; they always come, and they have their carriages—­”

“That’s just it.  They’re getting so damned high-toned that they’ll soon feel independent of me.  But I’ll turn them out, bag and baggage.”

“They treat you exactly as they have treated you for thirty years and more, brother.”

“Do you think so?  Do you think they’ll come to-day?”

“I am sure they will, Hiram.”

He looked her up and down, then said, with a startling note of tenderness in his ill-used voice: 

“You ought to have a new frock, Marian.  That is looking old.”

Had not Dr. Webster been wholly deficient in humor he would have smiled at his sister’s expression of terrified surprise.  She ran forward and laid her hand on his shoulder.

“Hiram,” she said, “are you—­you do not look well to-day.”

“Oh, I am well enough,” he replied, shaking her off.  “But I have noticed of late that you and Abigail are looking shabby, and I don’t choose that all these fine folks shall criticise you.”  He opened his desk and counted out four double-eagles.

“Will this be enough?  I don’t know anything about women’s things.”

Miss Webster was thankful to get any money without days of expostulation, and assured him that it was sufficient.  She left the room at once and sought her companion, Miss Williams.

The companion was sitting on the edge of the bed in her small ascetic chamber, staring, like Dr. Webster down-stairs, through the trees at the rain.  So she had sat the night of her arrival at Webster Hall, then a girl of eighteen and dreams.  So she had sat many times, feeling youth slip by her, lifting her bitter protest against the monotony and starvation of her existence, yet too timid and ignorant to start forth in search of life.  It was her birthday, this gloomy Sunday.  She was forty-two.  She was revolving a problem—­a problem she had revolved many times before.  For what had she stayed?  Had there been an unadmitted hope that these old people must soon die and leave her with an independence with which she could travel and live?