tell the time of day by the clock hands.

Lucina was a quick-witted child, but seemed in some particulars to
have a strange lack of curiosity, or else an instinct to preserve for
herself an imagination instead of acquiring knowledge. She was either
obstinately or involuntarily ignorant as yet of the method of telling
time, and the hands of the clock were held before its face of mystery
for concealment rather than revelation to her. But she loved to sit
and watch the clock, and she never told her mother what she thought
about it. Directly in front of Lucina, as she sat waiting, hanging
over the mantel-shelf between the east windows, was a great steel
engraving of the Declaration of Independence. Lucina looked at the
cluster of grave men, and was innocently proud and sure that her
father was much finer-looking than any one of them, and, moreover,
doubted irreverently if any one of them could shoot rabbits or catch
fish, or do anything but sign his name with that stiff pen. Lucina
was capable of an agony of faithfulness to her own, but of loyalty in
a broad sense she knew nothing, and never would, having in that
respect the typical capacity only of women.

The east-room door had been left ajar. Presently a soft whisper of
silk could be heard afar off; but before that even a delicate breath
of lavender came floating into the room. Many sweet and subtly
individual odors seemed to dwell in this old house, preceding the
mortal inhabitants through the doors, and lingering behind them in
rooms where they had stayed.

Lucina started when the lavender breath entered the room, and looked
up as if at a ghostly herald. She toed out her two small morocco-shod
feet more particularly upon the floor, she smoothed down her own and