away. But a certain pensiveness remained. Her smiles were the
smiles of affection not of gaiety, and there was always a shadow in her
eyes. It was as if the recollection of the mystery from which her life
had emerged were never absent from her mind.

Still she took so much pleasure in her daily drives with Miss Ludington
that the latter ordered a pony chaise for her special use, and when Paul
arranged a croquet set on the village green, she permitted him to teach
her the game, and even showed some interest in it.

When the first dresses which had been ordered for her came home, she was
delighted as any girl must have been, for they were the richest and most
beautiful fabrics that money could buy; but Miss Ludington seemed, of the
two, far the more pleased.

For herself she had cared nothing for dress. In forty years she had not
given a thought to personal adornment, but Ida's toilet became her most
absorbing preoccupation. On her account she became a close student of the
fashion-papers, and but for the girl's protests would have bought her a
new dress at least every day.

She would have liked Ida to change her costume a dozen times between
morning and evening, and asked no better than to serve as her
dressing-maid. To brush and braid her shining hair, stealthily kissing it
the while; to array her in sheeny satins and airy muslins; to hang jewels
upon her neck, and clasp bracelets upon her wrists, and to admire and
caress the completed work of her hands, constituted an occupation which
she would have liked to make perpetual.

When Miss Ludington's mother had died she had left to her daughter, then
a young girl, all her jewels, including a rather flue set of diamonds.
When one day Miss Ludington took the gems from the box in which they had
been hidden away for half a lifetime, and hung them upon Ida, saying,
"These are yours, my sister," the girl protested, albeit with
scintillating eyes, against the greatness of the gift.

"Why, my darling, they are yours," replied Miss Ludington. "I am not
making you a gift. It was to you that mother gave them. I only return you
your own. When you left the world I inherited them from you, and now that
you have come back I return them to you."

And so the girl was fain to keep them.

Thus it had come about that before Ida had been in the house a week it
was no longer as a mystery, or, at least, as an awe-inspiring mystery,
but as an ineffably dear and precious reality, that her