ick going with you?"

"No, he is going to walk in the garden with Miss Featherstone."

Mrs. Pinckney felt quite cross: "He is positively insolent, ordering
things about in this way, interrupting my nap and all. What, under
Heaven, should I do without her if he is in earnest about Miss
Featherstone?"

If she could have heard what Colonel Pinckney was saying in the garden
she would have been still crosser.

"I want to enlighten you a little as to my fair sister-in-law," he
began after a few commonplaces.

"Oh, please don't, Colonel Pinckney"--unconsciously she was sliding
into the "Colonel." "I'd much rather you wouldn't. I think--" and she
hesitated.

"What do you think?"

"Why"--and she looked embarrassed--"I am afraid I shall not love Mrs.
Pinckney as well if you analyze and show up all her little weaknesses.
We could none of us bear it," she continued warmly. "Remember that
line--

Be to her faults a little blind.

I like to love people, and feel like a woman in some novel I've read:
'Long and deeply let me be beguiled with regard to the infirmities of
those I love.'"

"You're an angel!" he cried.

Miss Featherstone looked startled and annoyed.

Colonel Pinckney, with much self-possession, recovered himself
immediately. "We all know it," he continued jestingly--"Mr. Brown, the
children, servants and all; but, in spite of this, you shall not be
imposed upon. Now, I wish to give you a resume of Mrs. Pinckney's
life--"

"Oh, Colonel Pinckney! when we are under her roof!"

"It is a shelter bought with my father's money," he returned. "But you
must and shall hear me: it is necessary. She is the incarnation of
selfishness: in a young person it could go no further. One can pardon
anything rather than selfishness. She entirely exhausted our charity
during poor Harry's long illness. She travelled with every comfort that
money could give: she had her maid, Harry had his man, the children
were left with my mother. One winter they went to Nassau, the next to
the south of France: from both places she wrote such despairing letters
that my poor old father and mother were nearly beside themselves. It
was like the explosion of a bomb-shell in the household when a letter
came from Virginia. Sometimes I used to read and suppress them: they
were filled with shrieks and lamentations. Harry was in a rapid
decline; the mental torture was more than she could bear; some one must
come immediately out to her, etc. The firs