ve not been gone half an hour?" said Mrs. Carew, as
Margaret and Winthrop re-entered the eyrie's little drawing-room.

"Two hours, nearly," answered Winthrop, looking at his watch.

"Betty is _so_ demonstrative," said Mrs. Rutherford to her niece, in a
plaintive tone, when they were left alone. "I verily believe she has
kissed me during this one call at least twenty times. She always had the
best heart in the world--poor Betty!"

"She is very stout, isn't she?" she resumed, after a pause. "Her figure
is all gone, she's like a meal-sack with a string tied round it."

Her eyes wandered to the mirror, which gave back the reflection of her
own shapely person in its rich, perfectly fitting attire. "And how she
was dressed!--did you notice! That old-fashioned glace silk that shines,
made with gathers, and a hem--I don't know _when_ I've seen a hem
before."

She spoke with much seriousness, her eyes were slowly measuring the gulf
that separated this friend of her youth from herself. After a while
these eyes moved up to the reflection in the mirror of her own
silver-gray locks, arranged in their graceful waves above her white
forehead.

"She has the old-time ideas, poor Betty!" she murmured. Then, gravely
and impartially, as one who chronicles a past historical epoch: "She
still colors her hair!"

CHAPTER V.

Mrs. Carew's candles, in the old candelabra hung with glass prisms, were
all lighted; in addition, her astral lamp was shining on a table in the
back drawing-room, and near this lamp she was standing.

The two rooms were large, square, separated by folding-doors which were
held open by giant sea-shells, placed upon the carpet as weights. Wide
doors led also from each room into the broad hall, which was lighted by
a hanging lamp in a pictured porcelain shade. From the back drawing-room
a second door led into the dining-room behind, which was also entered by
a broader door at the end of the hall.

"Now, Pompey," said the mistress of the house, "are you quite sure you
understand? Tell me what it is you are to do."

Pompey, a small, yellow-skinned negro, whose large, orb-like, heavily
wrinkled eyelids (underneath which but a narrow line of eye appeared)
were the most prominent features of his flat face, replied, solemnly:
"W'en eberyting's ready, I fuss slips inter de hall, steppen softly, an'
shets _dish_ yer do', de back parlo' do' inter de hall. I nex' announces
suppah at de _fron_' parlo' do'. Den, wil