standing there, by that mirror, when their eyes first met in a sudden
instinctive sympathy. She herself had remembered and confessed it. He
recalled the pleased yet conscious, girlish superiority with which she
had received the adulation of her friends; his memory of her was broad
enough now even to identify Milly, as it repeopled the vacant and
silent room.

An hour later he was making his way to Colonel Pendleton's lodgings,
and half expecting to find the St. Charles Hotel itself transformed by
the eager spirit of improvement. But it was still there in all its
barbaric and provincial incongruity. Public opinion had evidently
recognized that nothing save the absolute razing of its warped and
flimsy walls could effect a change, and waited for it to collapse
suddenly like the house of cards it resembled. Paul wondered for a
moment if it were not ominous of its lodgers' hopeless inability to
accept changed conditions, and it was with a feeling of doubt that he
even now ascended the creaking staircase. But it was instantly
dissipated on the threshold of the colonel's sitting-room by the
appearance of George and his reception of his master's guest.

The grizzled negro was arrayed in a surprisingly new suit of blue cloth
with a portentous white waistcoat and an enormous crumpled white
cravat, that gave him the appearance of suffering from a glandular
swelling. His manner had, it seemed to Paul, advanced in exaggeration
with his clothes. Dusting a chair and offering it to the visitor, he
remained gracefully posed with his hand on the back of another.

"Yo' finds us heah yet, Marse Hathaway," he began, elegantly toying
with an enormous silver watch-chain, "fo' de Kernel he don' bin find
contagious apartments dat at all approximate, and he don' build, for
his mind's not dat settled dat he ain't goin' to trabbel. De place is
low down, sah, and de fo'ks is low down, and dah's a heap o' white
trash dat has congested under de roof ob de hotel since we came. But
we uses it temper'ly, sah, fo' de present, and in a dissolutory
fashion."

It struck Paul that the contiguity of a certain barber's shop and its
dangerous reminiscences had something to do with George's lofty
depreciation of his surroundings, and he could not help saying:--

"Then you don't find it necessary to have it convenient to the barber's
shop any more? I am glad of that, George."

The shot told. The unfortunate George, after an endeavor to collect