d her face in the sofa-cushions and did not answer.

CHAPTER II.

FORECASTING THE FUTURE.

Two of Mrs. Oliver's sitting-room windows looked out on the fig-trees,
and the third on a cosy piazza corner framed in passion-vines, where at
the present moment stood a round table holding a crystal bowl of Gold
of Ophir roses, a brown leather portfolio, and a dish of apricots.
Against the table leaned an old Spanish guitar with a yellow ribbon
round its neck, and across the corner hung a gorgeous hammock of
Persian colored threads, with two or three pillows of canary-colored
China silk in one end. A bamboo lounging-chair and a Shaker rocker
completed the picture; and the passer-by could generally see Miss Anita
Ferguson reclining in the one, and a young (but not Wise) man from the
East in the other. It was not always the same young man any more than
the decorations were always of the same color.

"That's another of my troubles," said Polly to her friend Margery
Noble, pulling up the window-shade one afternoon and pointing to the
now empty "cosy corner." "I don't mind Miss Ferguson's sitting there,
though it used always to be screened off for my doll-house, and I love
it dearly; but she pays to sit there, and she ought to do it; besides,
she looks prettier there than any one else. Isn't it lovely? The
other day she had pink oleanders in the bowl, the cushions turned the
pink side up,--you see they are canary and rose-color,--a pink muslin
dress, and the guitar trimmed with a fringe of narrow pink ribbons.
She was a dream, Margery! But she does n't sit there with her young
men when I am at school, nor when I am helping Ah Foy in the
dining-room, nor, of course, when we are at table. She sits there from
four to six in the afternoon and in the evening, the only times I have
with mamma in this room. We are obliged to keep the window closed,
lest we should overhear the conversation. That is tiresome enough in
warm weather. You see the other windows are shaded by the fig-trees,
so here we sit, in Egyptian darkness, mamma and I, during most of the
pleasant afternoons. And if anything ever came of it, we would n't
mind, but nothing ever does. There have been so many young men,--I
could n't begin to count them, but they have worn out the seats of four
chairs,--and why does n't one of them take her away? Then we could
have a nice, plain young lady who would sit quietly on the front steps
with the old people, and who