e Mrs. Laudersdale and Helen renewed their toilets, had busied
himself in weaving a crown of these and another of poppy-leaves, hanging
the one on Mrs. Laudersdale's head, as she entered refreshed, snowy, and
fragrant herself, and the sleep-giving things on Helen's,--the latter
avenging herself by surveying her companion's adornment, and, as she
adjusted the bloom-gray leaves of her own, inquiring if olives grew
pickled.

Nothing could be more airy and blithe than were Mrs. Laudersdale's
spirits all that morning,--bubbles dancing on a brook, nor foam-sparkle
of rosy Champagne. She related their adventures with graphic swiftness,
and improvised dangers and escapes with such a reckless disregard of
truth that Mr. Raleigh was forced to come to the rescue with more
startling improbabilities than they would have encountered in the
Enchanted Forest.

The red dawn brought its rain, and before they rose from table the
sunshine withdrew and large drops began to patter in good earnest. Mr.
Raleigh, who had generally suffered others to entertain him, now, as
Mrs. McLean ushered the whole company into the sewing-room, seemed
spurred by gayety and brilliance, and to bring into employ all those
secrets through which he had ever annihilated time. For a while devoting
himself to the elder dames, he won the heart of one by a laborious
invention of a million varicolored angles to a square barley-corn of
worsted--work, involved Mrs. McLean's crocheting in an inextricable
labyrinth as he endeavored to afford her some requisite conchological
assistance, and turned with three strokes a very absurd drawing of Mrs.
Laudersdale's into a splendid caricature. Having made himself thus
generally useful, he now proceeded to make himself generally agreeable;
went with all necessary gravity through a series of complicate
dancing-steps with Miss Heath; begged Miss Purcell, who was longing to
cry over her novel, to allow him to read for her, since he saw that she
was trying her eyes, and therewith made _fiasco_ of a page of delicious
dolor; and being challenged to chess by a third, declared that was
child's play, and dominoes was the game for science,--whereon, having
seated a circle at that absorbing sport, he deserted for a meerschaum
and the gentlemen, and in company with Captain Purcell, Mr. McLean, and
the rest, rolled up from the hall below wreaths of smoke, bursts of
laughter, and finally chimes of those concordant voices with which
gentlemen t