with what she saw reflected there.

"How much of a relation is he, Celia?" balancing the rosy bow with
a little cluster of pink hyacinth on the other side.

Celia Craig, forefinger crooked across her lips, considered aloud.

"_His_ mother was bo'n Constance Berkley; _her_ mother was bo'n
Betty Ormond; _her_ mother was bo'n Felicity Paige; _her_
mother----"

"Oh please! I don't care to know any more!" protested Ailsa,
drawing her sister-in-law before the mirror; and, standing behind
her, rested her soft, round chin on her shoulder, regarding the two
reflected faces.

"That," observed the pretty Southern matron, "is conside'd ve'y bad
luck. When I was a young girl I once peeped into the glass over my
ole mammy's shoulder, and she said I'd sho'ly be punished befo' the
year was done."

"And were you?"

"I don't exactly remember," said Mrs. Craig demurely, "but I think
I first met my husband the ve'y next day."

They both laughed softly, looking at each other in the mirror.

So, in her gown of rosy muslin, bouffant and billowy, a pink flower
in her hair, and Celia's pink-and-white cameo at her whiter throat
Ailsa Paige descended the carpeted stairs and came into the mellow
dimness of the front parlour, where there was much rosewood, and a
French carpet, and glinting prisms on the chandeliers,--and a young
man, standing, dark against a bar of sunshine in which golden motes
swam.

"How do you do," she said, offering her narrow hand, and: "Mrs.
Craig is dressing to receive you. . . . It is warm for April, I
think. How amiable of you to come all the way over from New York.
Mr. Craig and his son Stephen are at business, my cousins, Paige
and Marye, are at school. Won't you sit down?"

She had backed away a little distance from him, looking at him
under brows bent slightly inward, and thinking that she had made no
mistake in her memory of this man. Certainly his features were
altogether too regular, his head and body too perfectly moulded
into that dark and graceful symmetry which she had hitherto vaguely
associated with things purely and mythologically Olympian.

Upright against the doorway, she suddenly recollected with a blush
that she was staring like a schoolgirl, and sat down. And he drew
up a chair before her and seated himself; and then under the
billowy rose crinoline she set her pretty feet close together,
folded her hands, and looked at him with a smiling composure which
she no longer really fel