flushed rosily, and she abruptly took her eyes from Mrs. Burgoyne.

Miss Manisty, however--in despair of her nephew--was bent upon doing her
own duty. She asked all the proper questions about the girl's journey,
about the cousins at Florence, about her last letters from home. Miss
Foster answered quickly, a little breathlessly, as though each question
were an ordeal that had to be got through. And once or twice, in the course
of the conversation, she looked again at Mrs. Burgoyne, more lingeringly
each time. That lady wore a thin dress gleaming with jet. The long white
arms showed under the transparent stuff. The slender neck and delicate
bosom were bare,--too bare surely,--that was the trouble. To look at her
filled the girl's shrinking Puritan sense with discomfort. But what small
and graceful hands!--and how she used them!--how she turned her neck!--how
delicious her voice was! It made the new-comer think of some sweet plashing
stream in her own Vermont valleys. And then, every now and again, how
subtle and startling was the change of look!--the gaiety passing in a
moment, with the drooping of eye and mouth, into something sad and harsh,
like a cloud dropping round a goddess. In her elegance and self-possession
indeed, she seemed to the girl a kind of goddess--heathenishly divine,
because of that mixture of unseemliness, but still divine.

Several times Mrs. Burgoyne addressed her--with a gentle courtesy--and Miss
Foster answered. She was shy, but not at all awkward or conscious. Her
manner had the essential self-possession which is the birthright of the
American woman. But it suggested reserve, and a curious absence of any
young desire to make an effect.

As for Mrs. Burgoyne, long before dinner was over, she had divined a great
many things about the new-comer, and amongst them the girl's disapproval of
herself. 'After all'--she thought--'if she only knew it, she is a beauty.