Drummond so?"
asked Elizabeth, trying patiently to elicit facts and not vague
statements from Mattie.

"Oh, she said--no, please don't think I am exaggerating, for it is all
true--that they had lost their money, and were very poor, and, that
she and her sisters were dressmakers."

"Dressmakers!" shouted the colonel, and his ruddy face grew almost
purple with the shock: his very moustache seemed to bristle.
"Dressmakers! my dear Miss Drummond, I don't believe a word of it!
Those girls! It is a hoax!--a bit of nonsense from beginning to end!"

"Hush, father! you are putting Mattie out," returned Elizabeth,
mildly. It was one of her idiosyncrasies to call people as soon as
possible by their Christian names, though no one but her father and
brother ever called her Elizabeth. Perhaps her gray hair, and a
certain soft dignity that belonged to her, forbade such freedom. "Dear
father, we must let Mattie speak." But even Elizabeth let her work lie
unheeded in her lap in the engrossing interest of the subject.

"I do not mean they have been dressmakers all this time, but this is
their plan for the future. Miss Challoner said they were not clever
enough for governesses, and that they did not want to separate. But
that is what they mean to do,--to make dresses for people who are not
half so good as themselves."

"Preposterous! absurd!" groaned the colonel. "Where is their
mother? What can the old lady be thinking about?" Mrs. Challoner
was not an old lady by any means; but then the choleric colonel had
never seen her, or he would not have applied that term to the
aristocratic-looking gentlewoman whom Mattie had admired in Miss
Milner's shop.

"I had a good look round the room afterwards," went on Mattie,
letting this pass. "They had got a great carved wardrobe,--I thought
that funny in a sitting-room; but of course it was for the
dresses,"--another groan from the colonel,--"and there was a
sewing-machine, and a rosewood davenport for accounts, and a
chiffonnier of course for the pieces. Oh, they mean business; and I
should not be surprised if they understand their work well," went on
Mattie, warming up to her subject and thinking of the breadths of
green silk that reposed so snugly between silver paper in her
drawers at the vicarage,--the first silk dress she had ever owned,
for the Drummond finances did not allow of such luxuries,--the new
color, too; such a soft, invisible, shadowy green, like an autumn
leaf shrivelled b