He never forgave Elinor, and once more the little grocer's curse
thwarted his ambitions. For, deprived of its mother's milk, the
baby died. Old Anthony sometimes wondered if that, too, had been
calculated, a part of the Doyle revenge.



CHAPTER IV


While Grace rested that afternoon of Lily's return, Lily ranged over
the house. In twenty odd years the neighborhood had changed, and
only a handful of the old families remained. Many of the other
large houses were prostituted to base uses. Dingy curtains hung at
their windows, dingy because of the smoke from the great furnaces
and railroads. The old Osgood residence, nearby, had been turned
into apartments, with bottles of milk and paper bags on its
fire-escapes, and a pharmacy on the street floor. The Methodist
Church, following its congregation to the vicinity of old Anthony's
farm, which was now cut up into city lots, had abandoned the
building, and it had become a garage. The penitentiary had been
moved outside the city limits, and near its old site was a small
cement-lined lake, the cheerful rendezvous in summer of bathing
children and thirsty dogs.

Lily was idle, for the first time in months. She wandered about,
even penetrating to those upper rooms sacred to her grandfather, to
which he had retired on Howard's marriage. How strangely
commonplace they were now, in the full light of day, and yet, when