to man's neglect. It is so
hard to read in sixty's plainness the beauty of sixteen--to think that
underneath the placidity of advancing years may lie buried, yet
unforgotten, the memory of suits urged ardently, and quenched long ago
in tears.

Miss Euphemia put everything carefully away. The architect's wardrobe
was of the most modest proportions, but to her it seemed well furnished,
and even costly. She noted, however, with the eye of a sportsman
marking down a covey, sundry holes, rents, and missing buttons, and
resolved to devote her first leisure to their rectification. Such
mending, in anticipation and accomplishment, forms, indeed, a
well-defined and important pleasure of all properly constituted women
above a certain age.

"Poor young man!" she said to herself. "I am afraid he has had no one
to look after his clothes for a long time." And in her pity she rushed
into the extravagance of lighting the bedroom fire.

After things were arranged upstairs, she went down to see that all was
in order in Mr Westray's sitting-room, and, as she moved about there,
she heard the organist talking to the architect in the room below. His
voice was so deep and raucous that it seemed to jar the soles of her
feet. She dusted lightly a certain structure which, resting in tiers
above the chimney-piece, served to surround a looking-glass with
meaningless little shelves and niches. Miss Joliffe had purchased this
piece-of-resistance when Mrs Cazel, the widow of the ironmonger, had
sold her household effects preparatory to leaving Cullerne.

"It is an overmantel, my dear," she had said to dubious Anastasia, when
it was brought home. "I did not really mean to buy it, but I had not
bought anything the whole morning, and the auctioneer looked so fiercely
at me that I felt I must make a bid. Then no one else said anything, so
here it is; but I dare say it will serve to smarten the room a little,
and perhaps attract lodgers."

Since then it had been brightened with a coat of blue enamel paint, and
a strip of Brusa silk which Martin had brought back from one of his
wanderings was festooned at the side, so as to hide a patch where the
quicksilver showed signs of peeling off. Miss Joliffe pulled the
festoon a little forward, and adjusted in one of the side niches a
present-for-a-good-girl cup and saucer which had been bought for herself
at Beacon Hill Fair half a century ago. She wiped the glass dome that
covered the basket o