l the boys, including that young Breen you are so wild over,
and then I'll send for dear Ruth MacFarlane, who has just come North
with her father to live, and who doesn't know a soul, and nobody over
twenty-five is to be admitted. So if you and the Major want to come to
Ruth's tea--Ruth's, remember; not yours or the Major's, or mine--you
will either have to pass the cake or take the gentlemen's hats. Do you
hear?"

We heard, and we heard her laugh as she spoke, raising her gold lorgnon
to her eyes and gazing at us with that half-quizzical look which so
often comes over her face.

She was older than Peter--must have been: I never knew exactly. It would
not have been wise to ask her, and nobody else knew but Peter, and he
never told. And yet there was no mark of real old age upon her. She and
Peter were alike in this. Her hair, worn Pompadour, was gray--an honest
black-and-white gray; her eyes were bright as needle points; the skin
slightly wrinkled, but fresh and rosy--a spare, straight, well-groomed
old lady of--perhaps sixty--perhaps sixty-five, depending on her dress,
or undress, for her shoulders were still full and well rounded. "The
most beautiful neck and throat, sir, in all Washington in her day," old
General Waterbury once told me, and the General was an authority. "You
should have seen her in her prime, sir. What the devil the men were
thinking of I don't know, but they let her go back to Geneseo, and there
she has lived ever since. Why, sir, at a ball at the German Embassy she
made such a sensation that--" but then the General always tells such
stories of most of the women he knows.

There was but little left of that kind of beauty. She had kept her
figure, it is true--a graceful, easy moving figure, with the waist of a
girl; well-proportioned arms and small, dainty hands. She had kept,
too, her charm of manner and keen sense of humor--she wouldn't have
been Peter's sister otherwise--as well as her interest in her friend's
affairs, especially the love affairs of all the young people about her.

Her knowledge of men and women had broadened. She read them more easily
now than when she was a girl--had suffered, perhaps, by trusting them
too much. This had sharpened the tip end of her tongue to so fine a
point that when it became active--and once in a while it did--it could
rip a sham reputation up the back as easily as a keen blade loosens the
seams of a bodice.

Peter fell in at once with her plan for a "Ro