rs. Thornburgh is in such a flutter about
this visit! One would think it was the Bishop and all his Canons, and
promotion depending on it, she has baked so many cakes and put out so
many dinner napkins! I don't envy the young man. She will have no wits
left at all to entertain him with. I actually wound up by administering
some sal-volatile to her.'

'Well, and after the sal-volatile did you get anything coherent out of
her on the subject of the young man?'

'By degrees,' said the girl, her eyes twinkling; 'if one can only
remember the thread between whiles one gets at the facts somehow. In
between the death of Mr. Elsmere's father and his going to college, we
had, let me see,--the spare room curtains, the making of them and the
cleaning of them, Sarah's idiocy in sticking to her black sheep of a
young man, the price of tea when she married, Mr. Thornburgh's singular
preference of boiled mutton to roast, the poems she had written to her
when she was eighteen, and I can't tell you what else besides. But I
held fast, and every now and then I brought her up to the point again,
gently but firmly, and now I think I know all I want to know about the
interesting stranger.'

'My ideas about him are not many,' said Agnes, rubbing her cheek gently
up and down the purring cat, 'and there doesn't seem to be much order
in them. He is very accomplished--a teetotaller--he has been to the Holy
Land, and his hair has been out close after a fever. It sounds odd, but
I am not curious. I can very well wait till to-morrow evening.'

'Oh, well, as to ideas about a person, one doesn't got that sort of
thing from Mrs. Thornburgh. But I know how old he is, where he went
to college, where his mother lives, a certain number of his mother's
peculiarities which seem to be Irish and curious, where his living is,
how much it is worth, likewise the color of his eyes, as near as Mrs.
Thornburgh can get.'

'What a start you have been getting!' said Agnes lazily. 'But what is it
makes the poor old thing so excited?'

Rose sat up and began to fling the fir-cones lying about her at a
distant mark with an energy worthy of her physical perfections and the
aesthetic freedom of her attire.

'Because, my dear, Mrs. Thornburgh at the present moment is always
seeing herself as the conspirator sitting match in hand before a mine.
Mr. Elsmere is the match--we are the mine.'

Agnes looked at her sister, and they both laughed, the bright rippling
laugh of y