Estelle sat in a low arm-chair close to the fire.

Gerald, to whom it did not seem cold enough for a fire, took a seat nearer the windows, whence he could watch the fading sunset-end beyond garden and street, river and hill.

He would have cared less, no doubt, to make himself not too dull company for this stranger, had he known that there, before that fireplace, a few days before, she had been placed in possession of the most intimate facts of his humiliating destiny. Unsuspecting, in a mood rather more amiable than usual, he asked, by way of entering into conversation, whether she and her friend were not New-Englanders. It established the sense of a bond, however light, to find that they and he were almost townsmen. He had been born in Boston, or, at least, near it. His parents had owned a house in Charlestown, where he had lived till he was ten years old. They talked for a while of Boston.

He had heard a singular thing, he said, she might be able to tell him how true: that in Boston a new medical method had arisen by which the sick were said to be made well without the help of drugs. Mind cure, he believed it was called. It seemed very extraordinary, and rather interesting, if it were not all a fraud or a fable, that persons of the most prosaic, as these had been described to him, should go about professing to do for a fee the same thing that saints of old are recorded to have done through their mysterious powers. The subject had come into his mind--he went on making conversation--from recently re-reading a book of George Sand's, _La Pet.i.te Fadette_, in which a cure is performed which seemed to him very similar. If she had not read the book, she must permit him to bring it for her perusal. He talked about the book.

A maid brought in a lighted lamp, and, as is the pleasant custom of the country, wished them a happy evening.

Very soon after it came Aurora, with a dab of flour on one cheek, which the kitchen fire had warmed to a deeper pink.

"There," she said, "they're all ready for the oven. When we took the house, all the stove we had was a big stone block thing with little square holes. The cook fanned them with a turkey-wing. But now we've got a range. Don't you want me to show you over the house? There'll be just time before supper."

"I'm afraid it's all dark," said Estelle. "Let me ring and have them light up. Think of a city house without gas!"

"No, they'd be too long. I can take a lamp."

She went for it to her dressing-room, and came back with one easy to carry, long in the stem and small in the tank, from which, to make it brighter, she had lifted off the shade. Gerald reached to take it from her, but she refused his help.

"The weight's nothing. I want you to be free to look around. Coming, Estelle?"

"I'll join you in a minute."

They went down the wide stairs side by side. She led through a door, at the right, as you entered the house, of the main door.

"Here's one of the parlors. We have four on this floor, between big and little. Four parlors and a dining-room. Doesn't that seem a good many for two lone women?"

The unshaded lamplight showed a crowd of furniture, modern, m.u.f.fled, expensive, the lack of simplicity in design of which was further rendered dreadful to the artist by every device to make it still less simple, embroidered scarfs thrown over chair-backs, varicolored textiles depending from the mantel-shelf, drooping over the mirror, down pillows of every shape and tint piled in sofa-corners. Nothing was left undecorated. The waste-basket even wore a fat satin bow, like a pet poodle. Every horizontal surface was enc.u.mbered with knick-knacks.

"This is where we have people come when we don't know them very well,"

said Mrs. Hawthorne, hardly concealing her pride. "We couldn't ask the minister to come right upstairs, as we did you. How do you--"

"Mrs. Hawthorne," came hurriedly from Gerald, "I beg you will not ask me how I like it! It is a peculiarity like--like not liking oysters. I can't bear to be asked how I like things."

"How funny! But, then, you're different from other people, aren't you?

That's what makes you so interesting."

She preceded him into the next room, which was not so bad as the first for the reason that, as she explained, "they hadn't yet finished with it." He seized the occasion almost eagerly to praise the chairs.

"We found them here when we came," she informed him. "There was a good lot of furniture of this big, bare sort; clumsy, I call it. We stored some of it in the top rooms, but Leslie Foss begged me so to let these stay that we just had the seats covered over with this new stuff and left them."

When she opened the next door and stepped into the s.p.a.ce beyond it seemed as if her lamp had dwindled to a taper, the room was so vast. It had nine great windows, five in an unbroken row on the front of the house the entire width of which it occupied. Aurora's light was faintly reflected in a polished floor; it twinkled in the myriad motionless drops of two great crystal chandeliers.

"Ah," exclaimed Gerald in a long sigh. "This is superb!"

"Yes," she said, "but you might as well try to furnish all outdoors. You see that we haven't done anything beyond putting up curtains. We never use it. All those chairs along the walls are going to be regilded when we can get them to come and fetch them. Things move awfully slowly over here, don't they, even if you're willing to pay."

"What a ball-room!"

"Yes. Wish we could give a ball; but we only know about a dozen people.

We've got to wait till we know enough at least for two sets of a quadrille."

She was moving across the wide floor, holding her torch-like lamp high the better to illumine the great pale, silent emptiness. No longer hearing his footsteps echoing behind hers, she looked over her shoulder; whereupon he hurriedly joined her, without explaining why he had lagged.

"This," she said, as turning to the left they pa.s.sed from the ball-room into a small oval room the domed ceiling of which was all tenderly bepainted with Cupids and garlands--"this is almost my favorite."

She set down her lamp on a table of rose-tinged marble, and dropped for a minute on to a little rococo settee.

"The things in here we found just as you see them."

"So I imagined."

"All but the ornaments on the mantel."

"Very astute in me; I divined that, too."

"We liked it, so we left it. Pretty, ain't it? Oh, beg pardon!" She blushed and looked at him sidelong, laughing. "That was a bad break!

That came mighty near to being the forbidden question how you like it.

All the same, it is pretty, _is it not_?"

"Extremely. Extremely pretty."

"There are going to be some tapestries presently. Oh, don't be afraid!

Not those old worsted things full of maggots, but beautiful new ones, painted by hand, all in these same delicate colors. A story in four scenes, one for each panel. The 'Fountain of Love' is the subject. It sounds to me like something Biblical, Sunday-schoolish, but Mr. Hunt says, no, _it is not_."

"Mr. Hunt--"

"The nephew, Charlie. You know him, don't you? He's getting them done for me. He's a great friend of mine. He's helped me a lot to buy things."

"Did he help you to buy the pictures?"

"Yes. He knows the dealers, and gets them to make fair prices. I think it perfectly wonderful how cheap everything is over here. He helped me to buy these, too." She lifted the chain of pink corals, graduated from the size of a pea to that of a hazelnut, which with their delicate living color brightened her winter dress. "I can't say, though," she dropped, "that I found these particularly cheap. Hush!" she broke off.

"It's Hat! Quick!" she whispered, "let's get behind the door and say 'Boo!' as she comes in."

Amazingly, incredibly to him, this grown woman appeared about to ensconce herself.

"But won't it make her jump?" he asked, supposing it to be Miss Madison for whom the little surprise was intended.

"Of course it'll make her jump. No matter how often I do it, she jumps.

That's the fun."

"Mrs. Hawthorne, please!" he begged nervously. "As a very special favor to me, don't! It would make me jump, too--horribly."

She stood listening while the footsteps turned away and faded fruitlessly. With a look of disappointment, as at opportunity missed, she took up her lamp and moved on.

"And here," she said, leaving the oval room by the door opposite to the one they had come through, "is the dining-room. Which takes us back to the hall and completes the circle."

This room, of a fine new Pompeian red, was lighted. The table was set; a butler busied himself at the sideboard. Gerald's eye was caught by the brightness of a china basket piled high with sumptuous fruit, and similarly caught the next moment by the pattern of the curtains, in which the same rampant red lion was innumerably repeated on a ground of wide-meshed lace.