supported by great white pillars, darkened the second-story
windows. There was no tangle of vines about its blank walls of
cream-colored brick with white trimmings, nor even trees to soften the
stare with which it surveyed the dusty highway; and the formal precision
of the place was unrelieved by flowers, except for a stiff design in
foliage plants on the perfectly kept lawn.

On the eastern side of the house, about the deep windows of Mr. Dale's
sanctum, ivy had been permitted to grow, and there were a few larch and
beech trees, and a hedge to hide the stables; but these were special
concessions to Mr. Dale.

"I do dislike," said Mrs. Dale,--"I do dislike untidy gardens; flowers,
and vines, and trees, all crowded together, and weeds too, if the truth's
told. I never could understand how the Woodhouse girls could endure that
forlorn old place of theirs. But then, a woman never does make a really
good manager unless she's married."

Lois found her aunt in the long parlor, playing Patience. She was sitting
in a straight-backed chair,--for Mrs. Dale scorned the weakness of a
rocking-chair,--before a spindle-legged table, covered with green baize
and with a cherry-wood rim inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory. On it
were thirteen groups of cards, arranged with geometrical exactness at
intervals of half an inch.

"Well, Lois," she said, as her niece entered. "Oh, you have brought the
spoons back?" But she interrupted herself, her eyebrows knitted and her
lower lip thrust out, to lift a card slowly, and decide if she should
move it. Then she glanced at the girl over her glasses. "I'm just waiting
here because I must go into the kitchen soon, and look at my cake. That
Betty of mine must needs go and see her sick mother to-day, and I have to
look after things. But I cannot be idle. I declare, there is something
malicious in the way in which the relatives of servants fall ill!"

She stopped here long enough to count the spoons, and then began her game
again. She was able, however, to talk while she played, and pointed out
various things which did not "go quite right" at the wedding.

The parlor at Dale house was as exact and dreary as the garden. The whole
room suggested to Lois, watching her aunt play solitaire, and the motes
dancing in the narrow streaks of sunshine which fell between the bowed
shutters, and across the drab carpet to the white wainscoting on the
other side, the pictures in the Harry and Lucy books, or th