't accuse us of being dull and provincial!"

Miss Brent smiled. "As far as I can remember, Effie, it is always you
who accuse others of bringing that charge against Hanaford. For my part,
I know too little of it to have formed any opinion; but whatever it may
have to offer me, I am painfully conscious of having, at present,
nothing but your kind commendation to give in return."

Mrs. Dressel rose impatiently. "How absurdly you talk! You're a little
thinner than usual, and I don't like those dark lines under your eyes;
but Westy Gaines told me yesterday that he thought you handsomer than
ever, and that it was intensely becoming to some women to look
over-tired."

"It's lucky I'm one of that kind," Miss Brent rejoined, between a sigh
and a laugh, "and there's every promise of my getting handsomer every
day if somebody doesn't soon arrest the geometrical progression of my
good looks by giving me the chance to take a year's rest!"

As she spoke, she stretched her arms above her head, with a gesture
revealing the suppleness of her slim young frame, but also its tenuity
of structure--the frailness of throat and shoulders, and the play of
bones in the delicate neck. Justine Brent had one of those imponderable
bodies that seem a mere pinch of matter shot through with light and
colour. Though she did not flush easily, auroral lights ran under her
clear skin, were lost in the shadows of her hair, and broke again in her
eyes; and her voice seemed to shoot light too, as though her smile
flashed back from her words as they fell--all her features being so
fluid and changeful that the one solid thing about her was the massing
of dense black hair which clasped her face like the noble metal of some
antique bust.

Mrs. Dressel's face softened at the note of weariness in the girl's
voice. "Are you very tired, dear?" she asked drawing her down to a seat
on the sofa.

"Yes, and no--not so much bodily, perhaps, as in spirit." Justine Brent
drew her brows together, and stared moodily at the thin brown hands
interwoven between Mrs. Dressel's plump fingers. Seated thus, with
hollowed shoulders and brooding head, she might have figured a young
sibyl bowed above some mystery of fate; but the next moment her face,
inclining toward her friend's, cast off its shadows and resumed the look
of a plaintive child.

"The worst of it is that I don't look forward with any interest to
taking up the old drudgery again. Of course that loss of interest