smoke. He is as much at home by this fire as any gnome that may be
hiding among its shadows; but he is less familiar with the rest of
the room, and when he sees it, as for instance on his lonely way to
bed, he often stares long and hard at it before chuckling
uncomfortably.

There are five ladies, and one only of them is elderly, the Mrs. Coade
whom a voice in the darkness has already proclaimed the nicest. She
is the nicest, though the voice was no good judge. Coady, as she is
familiarly called and as her husband also is called, each having for
many years been able to answer for the other, is a rounded old lady
with a beaming smile that has accompanied her from childhood. If she
lives to be a hundred she will pretend to the census man that she is
only ninety-nine. She has no other vice that has not been smoothed
out of existence by her placid life, and she has but one complaint
against the male Coady, the rather odd one that he has long forgotten
his first wife. Our Mrs. Coady never knew the first one but it is she
alone who sometimes looks at the portrait of her and preserves in
their home certain mementoes of her, such as a lock of brown hair,
which the equally gentle male Coady must have treasured once but has
now forgotten. The first wife had been slightly lame, and in their
brief married life he had carried solicitously a rest for her foot,
had got so accustomed to doing this, that after a quarter of a
century with our Mrs. Coady he still finds footstools for her as if
she were lame also. She has ceased to pucker her face over this,
taking it as a kind little thoughtless attention, and indeed with the
years has developed a friendly limp.

Of the other four ladies, all young and physically fair, two are
married. Mrs. Dearth is tall, of smouldering eye and fierce desires,