except to take her
carriage, her coupe, her phaeton, or her dog-cart. Best of all she
loved her saddle horses. She had learned to ride, and the morning was
inclement indeed that she did not take a long and solitary excursion
through the Park, followed by the groom and Jadwin's two spotted coach
dogs.

The great organ terrified her at first. But on closer acquaintance she
came to regard it as a vast-hearted, sympathetic friend. She already
played the piano very well, and she scorned Jadwin's self-playing
"attachment." A teacher was engaged to instruct her in the intricacies
of stops and of pedals, and in the difficulties of the "echo" organ,
"great" organ, "choir," and "swell." So soon as she had mastered these,
Laura entered upon a new world of delight. Her taste in music was as
yet a little immature--Gounod and even Verdi were its limitations. But
to hear, responsive to the lightest pressures of her finger-tips, the
mighty instrument go thundering through the cadences of the "Anvil
Chorus" gave her a thrilling sense of power that was superb.

The untrained, unguided instinct of the actress in Laura had fostered
in her a curious penchant toward melodrama. She had a taste for the
magnificent. She revelled in these great musical "effects" upon her
organ, the grandiose easily appealed to her, while as for herself, the
role of the "_grande dame,_" with this wonderful house for background
and environment, came to be for her, quite unconsciously, a sort of
game in which she delighted.

It was by this means that, in the end, she succeeded in fitting herself
to her new surroundings. Innocently enough, and with a harmless, almost
childlike, affectation, she posed a little, and by so doing found the
solution of the incongruity between herself--the Laura of moderate
means and quiet life--and the massive luxury with which she was now
surrounded. Without knowing it, she began to act the part of a great
lady--and she acted it well. She assumed the existence of her numerous
servants as she assumed the fact of the trees in the park; she gave
herself into the hands of her maid, not as Laura Jadwin of herself
would have done it, clumsily and with the constraint of inexperience,
but as she would have done it if she had been acting the part on the
stage, with an air, with all the nonchalance of a marquise, with--in
fine--all the superb condescension of her "grand manner."

She knew very well that if she relaxed this hauteur, that her s