rested her elbow on the railing, her chin in her hand,
and gazed thoughtfully about her. As a matter of fact, she was the
most inspiring thing in view. At a distance of fifty yards she was
still a tall, slender girl. Her body retained the habit, as well
as the lines of youth; a trick of gliding into unexpected, pleasing
attitudes, which would have been awkward but for the suppleness of
limb to which they testified, and the unconsciousness and ease of
their irregularity.

Her face was a child's face in the ennobling sense of the word.
The record of the years written upon it seemed a masquerade--the
face of a clear-eyed girl of fourteen made up to represent her own
aunt at a fancy dress party. A face drawn a trifle fine, a little
ascetic, but balanced by the humour of the large, shapely mouth,
and really beautiful in bone and contour. The beauty of
mignonette, and doves, and gentle things.

You could see that she was thirty-five, in the blatant candor of
noon, but now, blushed with the pink of the setting sun, she was
still in the days of the fairy prince.

Miss Mattie's revery idled over the year upon year of respectable
stupidity that represented life in Fairfield, while her eyes and
soul were in the boiling gold of the sky-glory. She sighed.

A panorama of life minced before Miss Mattie's mind about as vivid
and full of red corpuscles as a Greek frieze. Her affectionate
nature was starved. They visited each other, the ladies of
Fairfield--these women who had rolled on the floor together as
babies--in their best black, or green or whatever it might be, and
gloves! This, though the summer sun might be hammering down with
all his might. And then they sat in a closed room and talked in a
reserved fashion which was entirely the property of the call. Of
course, one could have a moment's real talk by chance meeting, and
there were the natural griefs of life to break the corsets of this
etiquette, although in general, the griefs seemed to be long drawn
out and conventional affairs, as if nature herself at last yielded
to the system, conquered by the invincible conventionality and
stubbornness of the ladies of Fairfield. It was the unspoken but
firm belief of each of these women, that a person of their circle
who had no more idea of respectability than to drop dead on the
public road would never go to Heaven.

Poor Miss Mattie! Small wonder she dropped her hands, sat back and
wondered, with another sigh, if