ties moved
impatiently from time to time. Chrysophrasia was not present, a
circumstance which made it seem likely that she might have been the
person who had laughed behind the wall. Mary Carvel, like her husband,
was unusually silent, and I was sitting not far from Hermione. She
looked at me after her father's curt answer to her innocent remark, and
smiled faintly.

The drawing-room where we sat exhibited a curious instance of the effect
produced upon inanimate things when subjected to the contact of persons
who differ widely from each other in taste. You smile, dear lady, at the
complicated form of expression. I mean merely that if two people who
like very different things live in the same room, each of them will try
to give the place the look he or she likes. At Carvel Place there were
four to be consulted, instead of two; for John had his own opinions as
to taste, and they were certainly sounder than those of his wife and
sister-in-law, and at least as clearly defined.

John Carvel liked fine pictures, and he had placed three or four in the
drawing-room,--a couple of good Hogarths, a beautiful woman's head by
Andrea del Sarto, and a military scene by Meissonnier,--about as
heterogeneous a quartette of really valuable works as could be got for
money; and John had given a great deal of money for them. Besides the
pictures, there stood in the drawing-room an enormous leathern
easy-chair, of the old-fashioned type with semicircular wings projecting
forward from the high back on each side, made to protect the rheumatic
old head of some ancestor who suffered from the toothache before the
invention of dentists. Near this stood a low, square, revolving
bookcase, which always contained the volumes which John was reading at
the time, to be changed from day to day as circumstances required.

Mary Carvel was, and is, an exceedingly religious woman, and her tastes
are to some extent the expression of her religious feelings. She has a
number of excellent engravings of celebrated pictures, such as Holbein's
Madonna, Raphael's Transfiguration, and the Dresden Madonna di San
Sisto; she owns the entire collection of chromo-lithographs published by
the Arundel Society, and many other reproductions of a similar nature.
Many of these she had hung in the drawing-room at Carvel Place. Here and
there, also, were little shelves of oak in the common Anglomaniac style
of woodwork, ornamented with trefoils, crosses, circles, and triangles,