sitions pair of spectacles,
pretended to pull them off, rub them bright, and put them on again;
then, retiring a little from the window, spread out her dress into the
widest dimensions that it could be made to assume. The new arrivals thus
portrayed, were the doctor, whose spectacles were never clean enough
to please him; and the doctor's wife, an emaciated fine lady, who
deceitfully suggested the presence of vanished charms, by wearing a
balloon under her gown--which benevolent rumor pronounced to be only a
crinoline petticoat.

Here there was a brief pause in the procession of visitors. Mrs. Blyth
beckoned to Madonna, and began talking on her fingers.

"No signs of Zack yet--are there, love?"

The girl looked anxiously towards the window, and shook her head.

"If he ventures up here, when he does come, we must not be so kind to
him as usual. He has been behaving very badly, and we must see if we
can't make him ashamed of himself."

Madonna's color rose directly. She looked amazed, sorry, perplexed, and
incredulous by turns. Zack behaving badly?--she would never believe it!

"I mean to make him ashamed of himself, if he ventures near me!" pursued
Mrs. Blyth.

"And I shall try if I can't console him afterwards," thought Madonna,
turning away her head for fear her face should betray her.

Another ring at the bell! "There he is, perhaps," continued Mrs. Blyth,
nodding in the direction of the window, as she signed those words.

Madonna ran to look: then turned round, and with a comic air of
disappointment, hooked her thumbs in the arm-holes of an imaginary
waistcoat. Only Mr. Gimble, the picture-dealer, who always criticized
works of art with his hands in that position.

Just then, a soft knock sounded at Mrs. Blyth's door; and her father
entered, sniffing with a certain perpetual cold of his which nothing
could cure--bowing, kissing his hand, and frightened up-stairs by the
company, just as his daughter had predicted.

"Oh, Lavvie! the Dowager Countess is downstairs, and her ladyship likes
the pictures," exclaimed the old man, snuffling and smiling infirmly in
a flutter of nervous glee.

"Come and sit down by me, father, and see Madonna doing the visitors.
It's funnier than any play that ever was acted."

"And her ladyship likes the pictures," repeated the engraver, his poor
old watery eyes sparkling with pleasure as he told his little morsel of
good news over again, and sat down by the bedside of his favor