been conducted in state, I planned a piece of mischief to tease
Victor. While I awaited his coming, my heart beat wildly, as it
used to do when I was a child stealing into the drawing-room on
the last day of the old year to catch a glimpse of the New Year's
gifts piled up there in heaps. When my husband came in and looked
for me, my smothered laughter ringing out from beneath the lace in
which I had shrouded myself, was the last outburst of the
delicious merriment which brightened our games in childhood . . ."

When the dowager had finished reading the letter, and after such a
beginning the rest must have been sad indeed, she slowly laid her
spectacles on the table, put the letter down beside them, and looked
fixedly at her niece. Age had not dimmed the fire in those green eyes
as yet.

"My little girl," she said, "a married woman cannot write such a
letter as this to a young unmarried woman; it is scarcely proper--"

"So I was thinking," Julie broke in upon her aunt. "I felt ashamed of
myself while you were reading it."

"If a dish at table is not to our taste, there is no occasion to
disgust others with it, child," the old lady continued benignly,
"especially when marriage has seemed to us all, from Eve downwards, so
excellent an institution. . . You have no mother?"

The Countess trembled, then she raised her face meekly, and said:

"I have missed my mother many times already during the past year; but
I have myself to blame, I would not listen to my father. He was