t color, looked to her cold-pinched
and under-nourished. She had a sense of his long evenings alone,
drearily without fire, his solitary meals in that dining-room so
unsuggestive of good cheer; she thought of that single candle on the
night-table burning in this cold, large room where he went to bed in
that bed of iron, laying his head on that small hair pillow, to dream
bitter dreams of a fair girl's treachery.

She wanted to turn to him protesting:

"Oh, I can't stand it! What makes you do it?"

His next words changed the current of her thoughts.

"I have another portrait of my mother," he said; "one I painted, which I
will show you if you care to see it."

She cheered up.

"Do! do!" she urged heartily. "I'm crazy to see something you've
painted."

"You won't care for my painting," he pronounced without hesitation; "but
the portrait gives a good idea of my mother, I think, when she was older
than this."

They returned to the drawing-room, where their friends were in the same
way engaged as when they left them. One pair was looking at a large
illustrated book; the other two sat leaning toward each other talking in
undertones.

"The bird which you see," the abbe was saying, "with the smaller birds
crowding around him, is a pelican. The pelican, you know, who opens his
breast to feed his young, is a symbol of the Church."

"It's not true, though, that the pelican does that," Estelle was on the
point of saying with American freedom, "any more than that a scorpion
surrounded by fire commits suicide. I read it in a Sunday paper where a
lot of old superstitions were exploded." But she tactfully did nothing
of the sort. She appeared instructed and impressed.

What Miss Seymour was saying to Mrs. Foss would have sounded a little
singular to any one overhearing. The two women had been friends for
years, but never come so near to each other as, it chanced, they did
that afternoon, when all fell so favorably for a heart to heart talk.

"I feel as if I had lost a key!" said Miss Seymour, and looked like a
bewildered princess turned old by a wicked fairy's spell. "When I
possessed it I thought nothing of it. It opened all the doors, but I
didn't know what it was made them so easy to open. Only now, when it's
gone, I know the value of that little golden key."

"I know," said Mrs. Foss, sympathetically. "There's no use in us women
pretending we don't mind! Those who really and truly don't must be great
philosophers o