e shop, and it wasn't long after that
that her mother came down-stairs clad for the street, with her _Modern
Tendencies_ under her arm in a leather portfolio.

It had turned cold overnight, and there was a buffeting gusty wind which
shook the windows and rattled the stiff branches of the trees. Her
mother's valedictory, given with more confidence now that Portia was out
of the house, was a strong recommendation that Rose stay quietly within
doors and keep warm.

The girl might have palmed off her own inclination as an example of
filial obedience, but she didn't.

"I was going to, anyway," she said. "Home and fireside for mine to-day."

Ordinarily, the gale would have tempted her. It was such good fun to
lean up against it and force your way through, while it tugged at your
skirts and hair and slapped your face.

But to-day, the warmest corner of the sitting-room lounge, the quiet of
the house, deserted except for Inga in the kitchen, engaged in the
principal sporting event of her domestic routine--the weekly baking; the
fact that she needn't speak to a soul for three hours, a detective story
just wild enough to make little intervals in the occupation of doing
nothing at all--presented an ideal a hundred per cent. perfect.

She hadn't meant to go to sleep, having already slept away half the
morning, but the author's tactics in the detective story were so
flagrantly unfair, he was so manifestly engaged trying to make trouble
for his poor anemic characters instead of trying to solve their
perplexities, that presently she tossed the book aside and began
dreaming one of her own in which the heroine got put off a street-car in
the opening chapter.

The telephone bell roused her once or twice, far enough to observe that
Inga was attending to it, so when the front door-bell rang, she left
that to Inga, too--didn't even sit up and swing her legs off the couch
and try, with a prodigious stretch, to get herself awake, until she
heard the girl say casually:

"Her ban right in the sitting-room."

So it fell out that Rodney Aldrich had, for his second vivid picture of
her,--the first had been, you will remember, when she had seized the
conductor by both wrists, and had said in a blaze of beautiful wrath,
"Don't dare to touch me like that!"--a splendid, lazy, tousled creature,
in a chaotic glory of chestnut hair, an unlaced middy-blouse, a plaid
skirt twisted round her knees, and a pair of ridiculous red bedroom
slippers, w