with that old, drunken Reinhardt!"

Sylvia was smitten into silence by the other's horrified tone and
hung her head miserably, only murmuring, after a pause, in damning
extenuation, "He's never so _very_ drunk!"

"Well, upon my word!" exclaimed Mrs. Hubert, in a widely spaced,
emphatic phrase of condemnation. To her sister she added, "It's really
not exaggeration then, what one hears about their home life." One of
her daughters, a child about Sylvia's age, turned a candid, blank
little face up to hers, "Mother, what is a drunken reinhardt?" she
asked in a thin little pipe.

Mrs. Hubert frowned, shook her head, and said in a tone of dark
mystery: "Never mind, darling, don't think about it. It's something
that nice little girls shouldn't know anything about. Come, Margery;
come, Eleanor." She took their hands and began to draw them away
without another look at Sylvia, who remained behind, drooping,
ostracised, pierced momentarily with her first blighting misgiving
about the order of things she had always known.




CHAPTER III

BROTHER AND SISTER


A fuller initiation into the kaleidoscopic divergencies of adult