ested,
with a little watchful urgency. "You come over some day when Fifi and
Mimi have got used to the place, and you can look at them all you want
to."

"Well, I just----"

But as Florence seemed disposed still to linger, her aunt's manner
became more severe, and she half rose from her reclining position.

"No, I really mean it! Fifi and Mimi are royal-bred Persian cats with a
wonderful pedigree, and I don't know how much trouble and expense it
cost Mr. Sanders to get them for me. They're entirely different from
ordinary cats; they're very fine and queer, and if anything happens to
them, after all the trouble papa's made over other presents I've had,
I'll go straight to a sanitarium! No, Florence, you keep away from the
kitchen to-day, and I'd like to hear the front door as you go out."

"Well," said Florence; "I do wish if these cats are as fine as all that,
it was Noble Dill that gave 'em to you. I'd like these cats lots better
if _he_ gave 'em to you, wouldn't you?"

"No, I wouldn't."

"Well----" Florence said again, and departed.

Twenty is an unsuspicious age, except when it fears that its dignity or
grace may be threatened from without; and it might have been a "bad
sign" in revelation of Julia Atwater's character if she had failed to
accept the muffled metallic clash of the front door's closing as a token
that her niece had taken a complete departure for home. A supplemental
confirmation came a moment later, fainter but no less conclusive: the
distant slamming of the front gate; and it made a clear picture of an
obedient Florence on her homeward way. Peace came upon Julia: she read
in her book, while at times she dropped a languid, graceful arm, and,
with the pretty hand at the slimmer end of it, groped in a dark shelter
beneath her couch to make a selection, merely by her well-experienced
sense of touch, from a frilled white box that lay in concealment there.
Then, bringing forth a crystalline violet become scented sugar, or a bit
of fruit translucent in hardened sirup, she would delicately set it on
the way to that attractive dissolution hoped for it by the wistful
donor--and all without removing her shadowy eyes from the little volume
and its patient struggle for dignified rhymes with "Julia." Florence
was no longer in her beautiful relative's thoughts.

Florence was idly in the thoughts, however, of Mrs. Balche, the
next-door neighbour to the south. Happening to glance from a bay-window,
she neglig