Page:Early Autumn (1926).pdf/110

 had been the backbone of a community, a family in which the men married wives for thrift and housewifely virtues rather than for beauty, a family solid and respectable and full of honor. It was a tribe magnificent in its virtue and its strength, even at times in its intolerance and hypocrisy. It stood represented now by old John Pentland and Anson, and the boy who lay abovestairs in the room next Olivia's, dying slowly.

At ten o'clock each night John Pentland bade them good-night and went off to bed, and at eleven Anson, after arranging his desk neatly and placing his papers in their respective files, and saying to Olivia, "I wouldn't sit up too late, if I were you, when you are so tired," left them and disappeared. Soon after him, Sybil kissed her mother and climbed the stairs past all the ancestors.

It was only then, after they had all left her, that a kind of peace settled over Olivia. The burdens lifted, and the cares, the worries, the thoughts that were always troubling her, faded into the distance and for a time she sat leaning back in the winged armchair with her eyes closed, listening to the sounds of the night—the faint murmur of the breeze in the faded lilacs outside the window, the creaking that afflicts very old houses in the night, and sometimes the ominous sound of Miss Egan's step traversing distantly the old north wing. And then one night she heard again the distant sound of Higgins' voice swearing at the red mare as he made his round of the stables before going to bed.

And after they had all gone she opened her book and fell to reading, "Madame de Clèves ne répondit rien, et elle pensoit avec honte qu'elle auroit pris tout ce que l'on disoit du changement de ce prince pour des marques de sa passion, si elle n'avoit point été détrompée. Elle se sentoit quelque