upon the other side.

"If things were different I would have to call on them. But as it is, I
am spared that bother at least," said Patricia, just as if being dead
did not change people at all.

Then a colored woman, trim and frillily-capped, came out of the watched
house. She bore some eight or nine letters in one hand, and fanned
herself with them in a leisurely flat-footed progress to the mailbox at
the lower corner.

"She looks capable," was Patricia's grudging commentary, in slipping
through the doorway into the twilight of the hall. "But it isn't safe to
leave the front-door open like this. One never knows--No, I can tell by
the look of her she's the sort that can't be induced to sleep on the
lot, and takes mysterious bundles home at night."

II

And it seemed to Rudolph Musgrave, now in the full flow of this droll
dream, that Patricia resentfully noted her front-hall had been "meddled
with." This much alone might Patricia observe in a swift transit to the
parlor.

She waited there until the maid returned; and registered to the woman's
credit the discreet soft closing of the front-door and afterward the
well-nigh inaudible swish of the rear door of the dining-room as the
maid went back into the kitchen.

"In any event," Patricia largely conceded, "she probably doesn't clash
the knives and forks in the pantry after supper, like she was hostile
armaments with any number of cutlasses apiece. I remember Rudolph simply
couldn't stand it when we had Ethel."

So much was satisfactory. Only--her parlor was so altered!

There was--to give you just her instantaneous first impression--so
little in it. Broad spaces of plain color showed everywhere; and
Patricia's ideal of what a parlor should be, as befitted the chatelaine
of a fine home in Lichfield, had always been the tangled elegancies of
the front show-window of a Woman's Exchange for Fancy Work. The room had
even been repapered--odiously, as she considered; and the shiny floor of
it boasted just three inefficient rugs, like dingy rafts upon a sea of
very strong coffee.

Patricia looked in vain for her grandiose plush-covered chairs, her
immaculate "tidies," and the proud yellow lambrequin, embroidered in
high relief with white gardenias, which had formerly adorned the
mantelpiece. The heart of her hungered for her unforgotten and
unforgettable "watered-silk" papering wherein white roses bloomed
exuberantly against a yellow background--which deplorab