young woman, whereas she is sunburned, and--it is
a dreadful word of course--but I can only call her leggy. Perhaps it
is the fault of those narrow skirts. Women have never been so much
respected since crinolines went out of fashion. I believe the
independence of the modern girl is no longer assumed; it is not even a
regrettable passing fashion; the time has come when I am afraid they
really are independent. Jane would think me insane if I were to go out
and sit with her in the garden when Peter comes to call, and I don't
believe she has ever done a piece of fancy-work in her life!' said Miss
Abingdon.

She looked round her pretty drawing-room in which, with a spinster's
instinct for preserving old family treasures, she had gathered and
garnered antique pieces of furniture, ill-drawn family portraits, and
chairs covered with the worsted-work and beadwork of fifty or sixty
years ago. She looked regretfully at the piano and the old, neatly
bound folios of music with 'M. A.' upon the covers, and she wondered
how it was that no one cared to hear her 'pieces' now. She went over
to the music-stand and fingered them in a contemplative way. How
industriously she used to practise 'Woodland Warblings,' 'My Pretty
Bird,' 'La Sympathie, Valse Sentimentale pour le Piano,' and 'Quant' e
piu bella,' fingered and arranged with variations.

On Sunday afternoons when her guests 'were having a look at the mokes'
Miss Abingdon still played through her book of sacred pieces; and it
was on Sunday afternoons, too, that she always stirred the jars of
potpourri upon the cabinets, so that their pungent, faint odour might
exhale through the room. The old pieces of music and the scent of the
dried rose-leaves together always brought back to Miss Abingdon's mind
fragrant memories of long ago.

'We used to take a roll of music with us when we were asked out to
dinner,' she reflected, 'and it was all-important to us who should turn
over our leaves for us, and we generally blushed and hesitated before
we sat down to the piano at all. Last night Jane almost fought with
Peter for the larger portion of the keyboard of the piano; and they
played music without any tune in it, to my way of thinking, and there
is no seriousness at all about any of them.'

'I wonder if they'--Miss Abingdon again referred to that distressing
body of young women of the present day--'I wonder if they have ever
kissed a lover's letter, or have slept with his picture