re slabs of smooth red sandstone from the beach.

"No children here, certainly," whispered Ida. "Every one of those clam
shells is placed just so. And this walk is swept every day. No, we
shall never dare to ask for anything to eat here. They would be afraid
of our scattering crumbs."

Ida lifted her hand to knock, but before she could do so, the door was
thrown open and a breathless little lady appeared on the threshold.

She was very small, with an eager, delicately featured face and dark
eyes twinkling behind gold-rimmed glasses. She was dressed
immaculately in an old-fashioned gown of grey silk with a white muslin
fichu crossed over her shoulders, and her silvery hair fell on each
side of her face in long, smooth curls that just touched her shoulders
and bobbed and fluttered with her every motion; behind, it was caught
up in a knot on her head and surmounted by a tiny lace cap.

She looks as if she had just stepped out of a bandbox of last century,
thought Mary.

"Are you Cousin Abner's girls?" demanded the little lady eagerly.
There was such excitement and expectation in her face and voice that
both the Seymour girls felt uncomfortably that they ought to be
"Cousin Abner's girls."

"No," said Mary reluctantly, "we're not. We are only--Martin Seymour's
girls."

All the light went out of the little lady's face, as if some
illuminating lamp had suddenly been quenched behind it. She seemed
fairly to droop under her disappointment. As for the rest, the name of
Martin Seymour evidently conveyed no especial meaning to her ears. How
could she know that he was a multi-millionaire who was popularly
supposed to breakfast on railroads and lunch on small corporations,
and that his daughters were girls whom all people delighted to honour?

"No, of course you are not Cousin Abner's girls," she said
sorrowfully. "I'd have known you couldn't be if I had just stopped to
think. Because you are dark and they would be fair, of course; Cousin
Abner and his wife were both fair. But when I saw you coming down the
lane--I was peeking through the hall window upstairs, you know, I and
Juliana--I was sure you were Helen and Beatrice at last. And I can't
help wishing you were!"

"I wish we were, too, since you expected them," said Mary, smiling.
"But--"

"Oh, I wasn't really expecting them," broke in the little lady. "Only
I am always hoping that they will come. They never have yet, but
Trenton isn't so very far away, and it is so