uncertain in its mind as to whether it purposed to remain where it had
been put, or casually wander away on blind and timorous adventures.

A dozen years before, Mrs. De Peyster, then in the fifth year of her
widowhood, had graciously undertaken to manage and underwrite the
début of her second cousin (not of the main line, be it said) and had
tried to discharge her duty in the important matter of securing her
a husband. But her efforts had been futile, and to say that Mrs. De
Peyster had not succeeded was to admit that poor Olivetta Harmon
was indeed a failure. She had lacked the fortune to attract the
conservative investor who is looking for a sound business proposition
in her he promises to support; she had lacked the good looks to lure
on the lover who throws himself romantically away upon a penniless
pretty face; and she had not been clever enough to attract the man
so irrationally bold as to set sail upon the sea of matrimony with a
woman of brains. And so, her brief summer at an end, she had receded
to those remote and undiscovered shores on which dwell the poor
relations of the Four Hundred; whereon she had lived respectably, as
a lady (for that she should ever appear a lady was due the position
of Mrs. De Peyster), upon an almost microscopic income; and from which
bleak and distant land of second-cousindom she came in glad and
proud obedience to fill an occasional vacant place at one of Mrs. De
Peyster's second-best dinner parties.

She had arrived but the moment before to bid her exalted cousin adieu
and wish her _bon-voyage_, and was now silently gazing in unenvious
admiration at the jewels Mrs. De Peyster was transferring to their
traveling-cases--with never a guess that perturbation might exist
beneath her kinswoman's composed exterior. As a matter of fact, under
the trying circumstances which confronted Mrs. De Peyster, any other