, isn't it?" yawned that lady, nodding good-naturedly.
"Set down the wine, Sarah, and then you may go. I'm so dismally
slumbersome that if I keep you to help me, I shall fall asleep on your
hands. Have some wine, Ellen?"

"No, thanks," said the spinster. "If you don't want Sarah, she may
bring me up a nice lunch as soon as possible. I won't detain you any
longer; good-night."

And Miss Arthur, who had meditated entering and giving Cora the
benefit of some of her maiden dreams and fancies, marched away, a
trifle offended at the manner in which her sleepy sister-in-law had
anticipated and warded off the interview. Cora's good-night floated
after her as she sailed down the corridor. Then she heard the door
closed and the bolt shot into the socket. A little later, the door
opened noiselessly, and a female figure glided down the dark stairways
out into the night, and toward the arbor.

"Celine shall undo my hair," Miss Arthur thought, "and I'll have her
try that new set of braids and puffs, if it is late. I don't feel as
if I could sleep."

But Celine was not dutifully waiting in her mistress's dressing-room.

Sarah appeared with the lunch, and offered her services, but was
summarily dismissed, for Miss Arthur did not deem it wise to initiate
the house servants into the fearful and wonderful mysteries of her
toilet. Therefore, she lunched in solitude and disgust, but heartily,
notwithstanding, having just put off her very elaborate, but rather
uncomfortable evening dress and donned a silken gown, acting as her
own maid.

Then she fidgeted herself into a most horrible temper, and sat
deliberately down before the grate in a capacious dressing-chair,
determined to wait until the girl came, and deliver a most severe and
stately reprimand, the exact words of which she had already determined
upon.

The lady, sitting thus with her feet on the fender, her hands
comfortably clasping the big arms of the dressing chair, and her head
lolling rather ungracefully over its back, fell into slumber.

* * * * *

If Mrs. John Arthur had made a midnight appointment with Lucifer, she
would have fortified herself for the encounter by making a "stunning"
toilet. It was one of her fixed principles--she had fixed
principles--never to permit friend or foe of the male persuasion to
gaze upon her charms when they would show at a disadvantage. So when
she entered the arbor, which was suffused with a soft moonli