passed under the sycamores, the gate in the
wall opened cautiously and one of the ladies called to me timidly with
her face pressed to the crack. The two sisters were so much alike that
it was a minute before I discovered the one who spoke to be Miss
Matoaca.

"Will you please let me have a paper," she said apologetically, "we do
not take it. There is no gentleman in the house. I--I am interested in
the marriages and deaths," she added, in a louder tone as if some one
were standing close to her beyond the garden gate.

As I gave her the paper she stretched out her hand, under its yellowed
lace ruffle, and dropped the money into my palm.

"I shall be obliged to you if you will call out every day when you pass
here," she remarked, after a minute; "I am almost always in the garden
at this hour."

I promised her that I should certainly remember, and she was about to
draw inside the garden with a gentle, flower-like motion of her head,
when a gentleman, with a gold-headed walking-stick in his hand, lunged
suddenly round the smaller sycamore at the corner, and entrapped her
between the wall and the gate before she had time to retreat.

"So I've caught you at it, eh, Miss Matoaca!" he exclaimed, shaking a
pudgy forefinger into her face, with an air of playful gallantry.
"Buying newspapers!"

Poor Miss Matoaca, fluttering like a leaf before this onslaught of
chivalry, could only drop her bright brown eyes to the ground and flush
a delicate pink, which the General must have admired.

"They--they are excellent to keep away moths!" she stammered.

The sly and merry look, which I discovered afterwards to be his
invincible weapon with the ladies, appeared instantly in his watery grey
eyes.

"And you don't even glance at the political headlines? Ah, confess, Miss
Matoaca."

He was very stout, very red in the face, very round in the stomach, very
roguish in the eyes, yet I realised even then that some twenty years
before--when the results of his sportive masculinity had not become
visible in his appearance--he must have been handsome enough to have
melted even Miss Matoaca's heart. Like a faint lingering beam of autumn
sunshine, this comeliness, this blithe and unforgettable charm of youth,
still hovered about his heavy and plethoric figure. Across his expansive
front there stretched a massive gold chain of a unique pattern, and from
this chain, I saw now, there hung a jingling and fascinating bunch of
seals. The gentlem