And in the meantime the years passed and my own immediate family passed with them; but still the gaunt old woman lived on in her gaunt old house, becoming in time a myth to me, and to Hyndsville as well; where they referred to her, succinctly, as “the Scarlet Witch.”  I heard from her directly only once, and that was the year she sent me a red flannel petticoat for a Christmas present.  After that, as if she’d done her worst, she ignored me altogether.

My mother had wanted me to be a school-teacher, in her eyes the acme of respectability.  But as it happens, there are two things I wouldn’t be:  one’s a school-teacher, the other a minister’s wife.  If I had to marry the average minister, I should infallibly hate all church-goers; if I had to teach the average school-child and wrestle with the average school-board, I should end by burning joss-sticks to Herod.

So I disappointed my mother by becoming a typist.  After her death I secured a foothold in a New York house—­I’d always wanted to live in New York—­and went up, step by step, from what may be called a rookie in the outside office, to private secretary to the Head.  And I’d been a business woman for all of seventeen years when Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett departed at the age of ninety-eight years and eleven months, and willed that I should take up my life in the house where she had dropped hers.

“Oh, Sophy!” cried Alicia Gaines, the one person in the world who didn’t call me Miss Smith.  “Oh, Sophy, it’s like a fairy-story come true!  Think of falling heir to an old, old, old lady’s old, old, old house, in South Carolina!  I hope there’s a big old door with a fan-light, and a Greeky front with white pillars, and a big old hall, and a big old garden—­”

“And an old stove that smokes and old windows that rattle and an old roof that leaks, and maybe big, big old rats that squeak o’ nights,” I said darkly.  For the first rapture of the astonishing news was beginning to wear thin, and doubt was appearing in spots.

“Sophy Smith!  Why, if such a wonderful, beautiful, unexpected thing had happened to me—­” Alicia’s blue eyes misted.  I have known her since the day she was born, next door to us in Boston, and she is the only person I have ever seen who can cry and look pretty while she’s doing it; also, she can cry and laugh at the same time, being Irish.  Some foolish people, who have been deceived by Alicia Gaines’s baby stare and complexion, have said she hasn’t sense enough to get in out of a shower of rain.  This is, of course, a libel.  But what’s the odds, when every male being in sight would rush to her aid with an umbrella?

After her mother’s death I fell heir to Alicia, who, like me, was an only child, and without relatives.  Lately, I’d gotten her into our filing-department.  She didn’t belong in a business office, she whose proper background should have been an adoring husband and the latest thing in pink-and-white babies.