the only time that the child remembered seeing her mother in a chair.
How this miracle was accomplished only Octavia and Mademoiselle D'Ormy
could have told, but on a certain day in a chair she was and the heavy
rose silk curtains were drawn before the bed alcove and the room was
gay with flowers and a ruddy fire glowed in the iron grate under the
carved white mantlepiece. Felice sat adoringly on a footstool at her
feet and they talked a great deal about a time when Maman should not
only sit in a chair but should walk. It seemed that Octavia hoped to
take her daughter to a place she referred to rather vaguely as The
House in the Woods. Octavia had lived in this house in the woods when
she was a girl and she was very much worried about what might have
happened to the garden of that house. She thought that she and Felice
ought to make it lovely again--if Piqueur were only still strong
enough to help them. But before Felice had had time to find out just
who Piqueur was, Mademoiselle had ushered in a curly-haired young man
who carried a portfolio exactly like the one that Certain Legal
Matters carried. And it was while Mademoiselle was taking Felice back
to the garden that she heard her mother say,

"You must be patient with the silly fears of a woman who mistrusts all
lawyers--these deeds are duplicates of those that another--"

In the garden Felice told Mademoiselle D'Ormy who the curly-haired
person was--it was not for nothing that Felice had been staring at the
pictures in the big Shakespeare Illustrated on the drawing-room table.

"It's the Portia Person who is talking with Maman--" she assured
Mademoiselle gravely, "she looks like a man but she's really a lady--"

The Portia Person was surely as gentle as a lady when he hurried into