resigned despair, "but their awful perfume seemed to penetrate the
glass, so she took them down into the coal cellar."

"And a very good place for them, too," was Laura's feeling rejoinder;
"but you mustn't blame him," she charitably concluded, "for he couldn't
have chosen any other flower if he had had the whole Garden of Eden to
select from. It isn't really his fault after all--it's a part of
fatality like his flute."

"He played for me until my head almost split," remarked Angela wearily,
"and then he apologised for stopping because his breath was short."

A startled tremor shook through her as a step was heard on the
staircase. "Who is it, Laura?"

Laura went quickly to the door and, after pausing a moment outside,
returned with a short, flushed, and richly gowned little woman who was
known to the world as Mrs. Robert Bleeker.

More than twenty years ago, as the youngest of the pretty Wilde sisters,
she had, in the romantic fervour of her youth and in spite of the
opposition of her parents, made a love match with a handsome,
impecunious young dabbler in "stocks." "Sophy is a creature of
sentiment," her friends had urged in extenuation of a marriage which was
not then considered in a brilliant light, but to the surprise of
everybody, after the single venture by which she had proved the mettle
of her dreams, she had sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable
mediocrity. She had made her flight--like the queen bee she had soared
once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she
was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive.