One of them lay on the bed, asleep, a little chap four years old, his coat unfastened, his hair tumbled. The other, the younger, asleep too, lay on the mother’s knee, Harriet regarding him. He was aquiline, lean and handsome, baby as he was, like a little deer hound.
“His name is Stevie,” said Stephen’s sister.
Harriet looked up from the child to the mother, almost jealously. “Then he is mine, too; I have some part in him too, since his name is Stephen.”
CHAPTER FOUR
For two months Austen Blair and his niece lived on in the big house.
Alexina wondered if her uncle were not different from other people, for it must be the abnormal human who would not ask one question about his sister; mere curiosity must have demanded that much, Alexina thought, having a lively curiosity herself. To be sure, Aunt Harriet, from Uncle Austen’s standpoint, had outraged every convention to which they had been bred; she had married a man between whom and her family there had been bitterest enmity, between whom and her brother there had been personal encounter; she had gone from her brother’s roof to be married in a Catholic institution, by a Catholic priest.
It almost made Alexina laugh when she summed up the enormity of the offending. She gloried in it herself; she adored Aunt Harriet and loved her for it.
But the fact that her uncle could thus ignore the whole subject made it harder for Alexina to go to him about a matter which had arisen concerning herself.