our coming as a matter of course, so we judged they were prepared for
tourists that day, knowing that the hotel was full on account of the
wedding. Without a word she led us up-stairs and we breathed a sigh of
relief when we thought of a bath and supper. The house must have been
the home of fashionable people in its time, for the furnishings, though
old, were still luxurious. The carpet on the stairs was still thick and
soft to our feet, and the curtains I could see on the windows were of a
fine quality. At the head of the stairs there was an oil painting of a
woman in the dress of a by-gone day. The servant opened the door of a
room at the front end of the long up-stairs hall and we passed in.

We had known instinctively as soon as we entered the place that the
lady of the house was a woman of refinement and culture,
notwithstanding the reduced circumstances which made it necessary for
her to rent out rooms in this big mansion of a house in order to make
her living. "I should think she'd rent it or sell it," said practical
Sahwah.

"She probably can't bear to part with these things, which remind her of
her former life," I said, sentimentally.

We were all anxious to see the woman who had been the mistress of so
much splendor in days gone by and could not give up the house. The
bedroom we were shown to was luxurious compared to what I had been used
to at home. The bed was a mahogany four-poster covered with a spread of
lace, and the rug on the floor was a faded oriental. Opening out of the
bedroom was a bath with a shower and we made a dash to get under the
cooling flood. I have never seen such towels as were stacked up on that
little white table in the bathroom. They were all heavily embroidered
with initials and the fringe on them was every bit of six inches long.