k of well-being or wealth
anywhere; the few equipages in the streets had seen hard service; the
people who walked were either plainly dressed or shabby genteel; about
the doors of the principal hotels there were groups of men who wore, most
of them, dispirited or anxious faces. Ten years later the whole aspect of
the place was changing, but at this time it was passing through a period
of natural fatigue and poverty, and was not an inspiring spectacle to
penniless new-comers.

"It reminds me a little of Delisleville, after all," said Rupert.

Beyond the more frequented quarters of the town, they found broad,
unkempt, and as yet unlevelled avenues and streets, where modest houses
straggled, perched on high banks with an air of having found themselves
there quite by accident. The banks were usually grass-covered, and the
white picket fences enclosed bits of ground where scant fruit-trees and
disorderly bushes grew; almost every house possessed a porch, and almost
every porch was scrambled over by an untidy honeysuckle or climbing rose
which did its best to clothe with some grace the dilapidated woodwork and
the peeled and blistered paint.

Before one of these houses Tom stopped to look at a lopsided sign in the
little garden, which announced that rooms were to be rented within.

"Perhaps we can find something here," he said, "that may suit the first
ventures of millionaires. It's the sort of thing that will appeal to the
newspaper man who writes the thing up; 'First home of the De Willoughbys
when they arrived in Washington to look up their claim.' It'll make a
good woodcut to contrast with 'The great De Willoughby mansion in Fifth
Avenue. Cost five hundred thousand!'"

They mounted the wooden steps built into the bank and knocked at the
door. Rupert and Sheba exchanged glances with a little thrill. They were
young enough to feel a sort of excitement even in taking this first
modest step.

A lady with a gentle, sallow face and a faded black cotton gown, opened
the door. Her hair hung in depressed but genteel ringlets on each side of
her countenance; at the back it formed a scant coil upheld by a comb. Tom
thought he observed a gleam of hope in her eye when she saw them. She
spoke with the accent of Virginia.

"Yes, suh, we have rooms disengaged. Won't you come in?" she said.

She led them into a neat but rather painful little parlour. The walls
were decorated with photographs of deceased relatives in oval frames, a