All the old family pictures and heirlooms, and sketches and pencillings, were arranged in the most charming way, so that her rooms seemed a reproduction of the old home.
"Hang it all!" said John, with a great flounce as he turned over on the sofa.

"I'm not up to par this morning." Now, Grace had that perfect intuitive knowledge of just what the matter was with her brother, that women always have who have grown up in intimacy with a man.

These fine female eyes see farther between the rough cracks and ridges of the oak bark of manhood than men themselves.

Nothing would have been easier, had Grace been a jealous _exigeante_ woman, than to have passed a fine probe of sisterly inquiry into the weak places where the ties between John and Lillie were growing slack, and untied and loosened them more and more.
She could have done it so tenderly, so conscientiously, so pityingly,--encouraging John to talk and to complain, and taking part with him,--till there should come to be two parties in the family, the brother and sister against the wife.
How strong the temptation was, those may feel who reflect that this one subject caused an almost total eclipse of the life-long habit of confidence which had existed between Grace and her brother, and that her brother was her life and her world.
But Grace was one of those women formed under the kindly severe discipline of Puritan New England, to act not from blind impulse or instinct, but from high principle.

The habit of self-examination and self-inspection, for which the religious teaching of New England has been peculiar, produced a race of women who rose superior to those mere feminine caprices and impulses which often hurry very generous and kindly-natured persons into ungenerous and dishonorable conduct.
Grace had been trained, by a father and mother whose marriage union was an ideal of mutual love, honor, and respect, to feel that marriage was the holiest and most awful of obligations.