e as she reached the
words.) "Remember me to Mrs. Lane and Miss--, I can't think
of her name,--Aunt Lydia, I mean.

"Sincerely yours

"GERALDINE VERNOR,

"P.S.--Olly only drinks milk."

Phebe took back the letter and folded it up. "Well?" she said.

"Well?" said Denham, looking at her and smiling.

"It's just like her," declared Phebe. "It's so downright and to the
point. Gerald never wastes words."

"You said it was like a man's letter," said Denham. "But I must beg leave
to differ with you there. I don't think it is at all such a letter as _I_
would have written you, for instance."

"Of course not. It wouldn't be proper for you to say 'Phebe, my dear,' as
Gerald does. Yours would have to be a very dignified, pastoral letter."

"Yes, addressed to 'My Lamb,' which you couldn't object to in a pastoral
letter of course, and which sounds nearly as affectionate, blaming you
for having caused me to lose the valuable information I might have gained
about the Baroness Bunsen. I never got much farther than her birth in
that famous history. I see poor Miss Delano casting longing glances in
here. I'll smuggle her in among you young people."

He departed on his errand of mercy, and soon had the timid little old
maid in the more congenial atmosphere of the parlor, where little by
little, though in a very stealthy and underhand way, the talk grew more
general, and the restraint slackened more and more, until sewing and
reading were both forgotten and the fun became fast and furious,
culminating in the sudden appearance of Jake Dexter dressed up as an
ancient and altogether unlovely old woman, whom Dick Hardcastle presented
in a stage whisper as "Baroness Bunsen in the closing chapter," and who
forthwith proceeded to act out in dumb show the various events of that
admirable woman's life, as judiciously and sonorously touched upon by Mr.
Webb in the drawing-room opposite. Jake was a born actor, and having
"done up" the Baroness, he proceeded to "do up" several other noted
historical characters, not omitting a few less celebrated contemporaries
of his own, each representation better and truer to life than the last;
and winding up with snatching away their work from the young ladies' not
unwilling hands, and piling it in heaps on the floor around him, he sat
himself in the middle with an armful hugged close and an air of comically
mingled resignation and opulence, and announced himself as "a photo from
life of ye destitute p