g--for all the world to see."

Miss Stapylton appeared to delight in the cloistered easy-going life of
Lichfield,--that town which was once, as the outside world has
half-forgotten now, the center of America's wealth, politics and
culture, the town to which Europeans compiling "impressions" of America
devoted one of their longest chapters in the heyday of Elijah Pogram and
Jefferson Brick. But the War between the States has changed all that,
and Lichfield endures to-day only as a pleasant backwater.

Very pleasant, too, it was in the days of Patricia's advent. There were
strikingly few young men about, to be sure; most of them on reaching
maturity had settled in more bustling regions. But many maidens remained
whom memory delights to catalogue,--tall, brilliant Lizzie Allardyce,
the lovely and cattish Marian Winwood, to whom Felix Kennaston wrote
those wonderful love-letters which she published when he married
Kathleen Saumarez, the rich Baugh heiresses from Georgia, the Pride
twins, and Mattie Ferneyhaugh, whom even rival beauties loved, they say,
and other damsels by the score,--all in due time to be wooed and won,
and then to pass out of the old town's life.

Among the men of Rudolph Musgrave's generation--those gallant oldsters
who were born and bred, and meant to die, in Lichfield,--Patricia did
not lack for admirers. Tom May was one of them, of course; rarely a
pretty face escaped the tribute of at least one proposal from Tom May.
Then there was Roderick Taunton, he with the leonine mane, who spared
her none of his forensic eloquence, but found Patricia less tractable
than the most stubborn of juries. Bluff Walter Thurman, too, who was
said to know more of Dickens, whist and criminal law than any other man
living, came to worship at her shrine, as likewise did huge red-faced
Ashby Bland, famed for that cavalry charge which history-books tell you
that he led, and at which he actually was not present, for reasons all
Lichfield knew and chuckled over. And Courtney Thorpe and Charles
Maupin, doctors of the flesh and the spirit severally, were others among
the rivals who gathered about Patricia at decorous festivals when,
candles lighted, the butler and his underlings came with trays of
delectable things to eat, and the "nests" of tables were set out, and
pleasant chatter abounded.

And among Patricia's attendants Colonel Musgrave, it is needless to
relate, was preeminently pertinacious. The two found a deal to talk