bstinately declaring that
she should be wretched in a home where everything "smelled of its
newness," she had coaxed and cajoled her friends until, almost without
their realizing it, there had been such a division of the old Bonnivel
effects and the new Lavillotte purchases that both houses presented a
pretty equal mingling of the ancient and modern. For instance, Joyce
begged the small round table with claw legs from their dining-room, to
send in its place one of the handsomest large mahogany rounds she could
procure. So Ellen's room was neatly furnished with Madame Bonnivel's
square heavy set, stately if not graceful, while the latter's bloomed
out with pier-glass and satinwood of the daintiest. The Bonnivels' worn
cane chairs somehow found places on Joyce's veranda, while a new
half-dozen rockers, of quaint and comfortable shape, took their places
through the pretty living rooms next door.

"I feel," said Joyce gaily, "so much more respectable than if my things
were all new. These good old plantation souvenirs give to my indefinite
outlines a deep rich background that brings me out in stronger colors."

For, with all her wealth and power, Joyce often felt this
"indefiniteness," as she called it. She knew people were wont to ask,
"Who is she? Where is her family?" and to look with some misgiving on a
girl too rich to pass unnoticed, yet too poor to own a family and a past
about which she was free to babble. She found that riches set one out
from the crowd as does the search-light which cannot be dodged nor
dimmed, and sometimes she would have flung every dollar away, and given
up all her pet schemes, just to have crept into the safe shelter of the
Bonnivel home as a real child of that house, to become as happily
obscure as Dorette, or Camille.

The Tuesday night of the first house-warming fortunately fell upon a
cool evening, when no one could much mind the occasional sprinkle of
rain, so glad were they of a change from the fierce heat and drought of
the past fortnight. As it was, the clouds brooded low, and the breeze
held the freshness of showers near by, while now and then the moon
peered through a rift and lit up the hushed darkness, which was like
that of a chamber where sleep comes after pain.

The Social house, gleaming with electric lights to the very summit of
the flag-staff above its roof, from which the stars and stripes waved in
languid contentment, was not only near the center of the town,
geographica