ich Clara, in a pale morning
gown, promptly entered--an apparition as cool and smooth and burnished
as if she had spent the night, like a French doll, in tissue paper.

Clara's coming in in the morning was an unheard-of thing. Flora was
taken aback.

"Why, Clara!" She was blank with astonishment. She sat up, flushed and
tumbled, and still blinking. "I hope I didn't keep you knocking long."

"Oh, no, indeed; only three taps." Clara looked straight through Flora's
astonishment, as if there had been no such thing in evidence. She drew
up a chair and sat down beside the bed. It was a rocking-chair, but it
did not sway with her calm poise. In the fine finish of her morning
attire, with her hands placidly folded on her knee, she made Flora feel
taken at a disadvantage, thus scarcely awake, disheveled and all but
stripped. But Clara, if she looked at anything but Flora's eyes, looked
only at her hands, one and then the other as they lay upon the coverlet.

"It isn't so very late," she said, "but I have ordered your breakfast. I
thought you would want it if you had that ten-o'clock appointment; and
there is something I want to ask you before you go out." Flora was
conscious of a little apprehension. "It's about that place you talked of
taking for the summer." She felt vaguely relieved, though she had had no
actual grounds for anticipating an awkward question. "I came upon
something in the oddest way you can imagine," Clara pursued her subject.
"Had you any idea the Herricks were in straits?"

"The young Herricks?"

"Oh, no! The old Herricks, _the_ Herricks, Mrs. Herrick whom you so much
admire! Of course, one isn't told; but they must be, to be willing to
let the old place."

"Not the San Mateo place?" said Flora, with a stir of interest. She felt
as astonished as if some Confucian fanatic had set up his joss at
auction.

Clara complacently nodded.

"Mrs. Herrick spoke to me herself. They don't want any publicity about
it, but she had heard that we were looking, and she did me the
favor"--Clara smiled a little dryly--"of telling me first."

Flora looked reflective. "I've never seen it, but they say it's
beautiful."

"It is, in a way," Clara grudgingly admitted, "but it isn't new; and the
ridiculous part is that she will let it only on condition that it shall
not be done over. It is in sufficiently good shape, but it stands now
just as Colonel Herrick furnished it forty years ago."

"Why, I should love that!" Flor