eyes
triumphantly, but he edged to her side and bent to whiff the roses,
muttering, "The worst is yet to come."

However, the slender figure of Mrs. Folsom drifted from one to the other
of her welcomers, unembarrassed, friendly, appealing. She put them
immediately at their ease as she announced:

"We shall all at once have tea. On the terrace--my little _festa_! I,
who find the home of my fathers in your new green country." A lovely
color coming into her dark face, she burst into undulating Italian. "The
first Dago she's spoke sence she's got here," commented Mr. Fripp, in an
undertone. Once more he creaked up to the mistress of the villa, saying,
loudly:

"Too bad about the furniture!"

The new-comer turned upon the junction agent liquid, long-lashed eyes.
"Ah the _garnitures_ of Bella Fortuna, they have been--how do you say
it, Weeliam?--dislocated, smashed in traveling the great waves." She
appealed anxiously to the junction agent. "I fear they are in great
distress of breaking, but"--a light came into the appealing dark
eyes--"but in your so practical country shall we not find the new?"

Mrs. Pawket, hearing this, suddenly nudged her husband, and Mr. Pawket
realized that his moment had come. He took one or two ponderous steps
forward, wiping his brow, clearing his throat. In his buzzing brain he
sensed a great occasion, like a wedding or a funeral. He got a glimpse
of Mrs. Pawket nodding her head urgently and mouthing his words after
him as he roared:

"That's as may be; that's as may be." Again Mr. Pawket cleared his
throat. He felt, as he afterward expressed it, "like he was grindin' a
corn-hopper with nothing into it." Suddenly his gaze fell upon Willum,
his boy, now a glad-looking man with a tender light in his eyes and his
arm around his dark-eyed wife. This, Mr. Pawket felt, was as it should
be. It gave him sudden eloquence.

"I dunno," he said, and he bent a severe eye upon the Rural, Mr. Fripp,
and the hotel-keeper's daughter--"I dunno but what we was gettin' a
little sour-hearted, here in Brook Center. There has been some spites
and a good many mean doin's and sayin's--namin' no names. What we didn't
have was big feelin's. Everybody was nesty and nifty, and we all thought
we know'd it all; but it seems that yet for all we didn't know much
about vanillas nor that they could turn out so purty as this here
vanilla has gone and turned."

William Folsom poked the architect in the ribs. "Hear! Hear!" he