before
Eloise, at first forgetting it, and then dreading it, could gather
courage to proceed in the negotiations for the handmaiden's suit. She
was vaguely aware that she was the last person in the world whose past
conduct harmonized with the asking of favors, and she silently offered
slight propitiatory sacrifices. Yet she did this so haughtily, in order
still not to compromise her own dignity, that they would quite as well
have answered the purpose of belligerent signals.

It was one afternoon that Eloise sat at the drawing-room window, having
recently finished her day's work, and letting herself linger now in a
place which she very rarely so much as passed through. She sat erect,
just then,--her head thrown far back, and the eyelids cast down along
the pale face. Mr. St. George came into the room noiselessly, and laid
down his riding-whip and gloves. Then he paused, struck by her
appearance, and admired her motionless attitude for several minutes.

"One sits for Mnemosyne," he said then.

Eloise lifted her eyes, and a ghost of color flitted along her cheek.
Here was a fortunate moment; the deity of it unbent and smiled. Her
heart beat in her throat between the words of her thought; yet she
recalled, for support, all the romances she had read, and their eloquent
portraitures of love, and, remembering that just as Rebecca loved
Ivanhoe, as Paolo loved Francesca, so Hazel and Vane loved each other,
"I must! I must!" she kept saying chokingly to herself. Mr. St. George
had taken up a book. How should she dare disturb him? At last a
hesitating voice came sliding towards him,--

"Mr. St. George"----

"I beg your pardon,--did you speak?" he asked, closing his book.

"Mr. St. George, I want to ask you a favor," replied Eloise.

She rose, and unconsciously with such an air that he saw her effort,
then came and sat on a lower seat directly before him.

"When papa, when my dear father was living," said she, "I had a maid,
who was always mine, who grew up with me, being only a little younger,
and I became attached to her"----

And before Eloise knew it she was lightly playing with Mr. St. George's
riding-whip,--that being one of her warm traits just out of Nature, the
appropriation of everything about her.

"And you have her no longer? That shall be attended to."

"Oh, yes, Sir, she waits on me still; that isn't it. She is only
seventeen, she has been an atom wayward,--just, you know, as I might
have been"----

Mr