wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above.

"Did you ever!" exclaimed Jane. It was of the footman that she was
speaking; he, in fact, loomed up to the practical eclipse of all this
luxury and display. "Only eighty years from the Massacre, and hardly
eight hundred feet from the Monument!"

Presently she heard a tapping and a rustling without. She thought that
she might lean a few inches to one side with no risk of being detected in
an impropriety, and she was rewarded by seeing the splendid vacuity of
the grand stairway finally filled--filled more completely, more amply,
than she could have imagined possible through the passage of one person
merely. A woman of fifty or more was descending with a slow and somewhat
ponderous stateliness. She wore an elaborate morning gown with a broad
plait down the back, and an immensity of superfluous material in the
sleeves. Her person was broad, her bosom ample, and her voluminous gray
hair was tossed and fretted about the temples after the fashion of a
marquise of the old regime. Jane set her jaw and clamped her knotty
fingers to the two edges of her inhospitable chair.

"I don't care if she _is_ so rich," she muttered, "and so famous and so
fashionable and so terribly handsome; she can't bear _me_ down."

The woman reached the bottom step, and took a turn that for a moment
carried her out of sight. At the same time the sound of her footsteps was
silenced by one of the big rugs that covered the floor of the wide and
roomy hall. But Jane had had a glimpse, and she knew with whom she was to
deal--with one of the big, the broad, the great, the triumphant; with one
of a Roman amplitude and vigor, an Indian keenness and sagacity, an
American ambition and determination; with one who baffles circumstance