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 for the human miracle. The attitude of Louise combined tolerance of Keble's solicitude with amusement at Miriam's half-embarrassed excitement. For the rest she accepted with common sense a situation which she privately regarded as an insult on the part of fate.

The apathy which Miriam had noted so uneasily in the early autumn had not disappeared, although it had lost its trance-like fixity, in the place of which had come a more regular attention to daily tasks, a quiet competence. Miriam's admiration for Louise had steadily grown, despite her distrust of Louise's intellectual "climbing" and her half-acknowledged envy of Louise's power to enslave Keble, to give Dare Rolands for his Olivers, and to bind maids and cooks, farm hands and horse wranglers, neighbors and creditors together in a fanatical vassalage. On none of her slaves did Louise make arbitrary demands. If she exhorted or scolded them, it was always apropos of their success or failure in being true to themselves. If Miriam's admiration ever wavered, it was on occasions when Louise, carried away by her own élan, cut capers merely to show what capers she could cut,—like an obstreperous child shouting, "Watch me jump down three steps at a time."

But recently Louise had not been cutting capers, and as she sat before a fire that gave the lie to the incredible temperature that reigned beyond the storm doors, calmly stitching garments for an infant whose