The murmur of conversation in the adjoining rooms died away. Once or twice after quiet descended, a little voice spoke out like the chirp of a drowsy bird, brooded over by mother wings. Persis went softly down the stairs. Joel waited long enough to make his advent impressive and followed her.
She sat as he had seldom seen her, thrown back in the roomy recesses of the big easy chair, her hands lying loosely in her lap. Her attitude suggested the relaxation following fatigue. Her eyes were half closed, her lips smiling. An indefinable rapture radiated from her. All her life Persis Dale had been a resolutely cheerful person. But that consistent, conscientious optimism was as unlike her present lightness of heart as the heat of a coal fire, carefully fed and tended, differs from the gracious warmth of June.
Singularly enough the sight of her satisfaction stirred her brother to instant indignation. Up to this moment a sense of grievance had been upper-most. Now he found himself shaken by hot anger. The instinct of the male to dominate, outlasting the strength which sustains and protects, spurred him on to have his way with her, to master this madness which threatened the peace of his life.
"Persis," he began in a loud angry voice, "what's the meaning of this piece of tom-foolishness?"
She opened her eyes and looked at him. After her two weeks' absence, their longest separation in twenty years, she saw him almost as a stranger would have done, a slight, undersized man with a bulging forehead which told of nature's generous endowments, and the weak chin, explaining his failure to measure up to the promise of his youth. His disheveled hair and burning eyes gave an unprepossessing touch to the picture. But the maternal feeling, always uppermost where her brother was concerned, had been intensified by the children's advent. Persis felt for the moment the indulgent disapproval of a mother toward an unreasonable child.
"Why, Joel!" Her voice, with its new depth and richness, caressed the name it uttered. "What's foolish about it?"
The gentleness of her answer misled him. He felt a sudden thrilling conviction of his ability to bring her to terms.
"What's foolish about it? What ain't foolish, you'd better say. Looks to me as if you'd taken leave of your senses. Filling up the house with pauper brats."
The blood went out of her face. The smile lingered, but it had become merely a muscular contraction, like the smile on dead lips. The soul had left it.
"Yes," she said steadily. "It's true they're poor. But it's not for you to fling that in their faces. A man who's lived on his sister's earnings for twenty years."