"_Hedrick_!"

"Yes, you will!--while she gets herself all dressed and powdered
up again. After that, she'll do her share of the work: she'll
strain her poor back carryin' Dick Lindley's flowers down the back
stairs and stickin' 'em in a vase over a hole in the tablecloth
that Laura hasn't had time to sew up. You wait and see!"

The gloomy realism of this prophecy was not without effect upon
the seer's mother. "Oh, no!" she exclaimed, protestingly. "We
really can't manage it. I'm sure Cora won't want to ask him----"

"You'll see!"

"No; I'm sure she wouldn't think of it, but if she does I'll tell
her we can't. We really can't, to-day."

Her son looked pityingly upon her. "She ought to be _my _
daughter," he said, the sinister implication all too plain;--"just
about five minutes!"

With that, he effectively closed the interview and left her.

He returned to his abandoned art labours in the "conservatory,"
and meditatively perpetrated monstrosities upon the tiles for the
next half-hour, at the end of which he concealed his box of
chalks, with an anxiety possibly not unwarranted, beneath the
sideboard; and made his way toward the front door, first glancing,
unseen, into the kitchen where his mother still pursued the