CHAPTER I


Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice. The stage of her
coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage for the
adventure of a young girl, her mother's drawing-room. Her mother had the
art of setting stages. The room was not large,--a New York brownstone
front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to entrance, and
allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally intended for its
use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a corridor; you had the
comfortable sense of four walls about you when its one small door was
once shut. It was filled, perhaps a little too much filled, with objects
which seemed to have nothing in common except beauty; but propinquity,
propinquity of older date than the house in which they now were, had
given them harmony. Nothing in the room was modern except some uncommonly
comfortable sofas and chairs, and the pink and yellow roses that stood
about in Chinese bowls.

Miss Severance herself was hardly aware of the charm of the room. On the
third floor she had her own room, which she liked much better. There was
a great deal of bright chintz in it, and maple furniture of a late
colonial date, inherited from her mother's family, the Lanleys, and
discarded by her mother, who described the taste of that time as "pure,
but provincial." Crystal and ivories and carved wood and Italian
embroideries did not please Miss Severance half so well as the austere
lines of those work-tables and high-boys.