At luncheon Mrs. Dale was again in high spirits. She chattered away brightly for the amusement of her young companion, who, entirely unaccustomed to so much attention, was happier than she ever remembered to have been in her life before. Mrs. Dale did not spare the eccentricities in walk and dress of the ladies in the neighborhood any more than they had spared hers. “I don’t know how you can ever be dull when such funny things come into your head!” cried simple Mabin, wiping her eyes over a hearty fit of laughing. Mrs. Dale grew suddenly grave again. “Ah, nothing is amusing when one is by one’s self, or when one has--thoughts!” she ended in a low voice, with a different word from the one which had been in her mind. “And now let me show you my den. No, it is not a boudoir; it is nothing but a den. Come and see.” She opened a door which led from the dining-room at once into a small room, even more bare, more sombre than the other. It had evidently once served the purpose of a library or study, for there was a heavy old bookcase in one corner and a row of empty book-shelves in another. And there was the usual horsehair sofa. By the one window, however, there was a low and comfortable, though shabby wicker chair. “I have had this other door fastened up and the cracks filled in,” said Mrs. Dale, showing a door opposite to the one by which they had entered. “It goes down by a flight of break-neck stairs into the drawing-room, a loathsome dungeon into which I never penetrate. The draught used to be strong enough to blow me away. So I thought,” she went on with curious wistfulness, “I might just have that done.” Again Mabin wondered at the penitential tone; again she glanced up. But Mrs. Dale recovered herself more quickly this time, and putting the girl gently into the wicker chair, while she curled herself up on the horsehair sofa, she drew Mabin out and encouraged the girl by sympathetic questions, and by still more sympathetic listening, to lay bare some of the recesses of her young heart. The afternoon passed quickly; and when Mrs. Dale, springing suddenly off the sofa after a silence, ran away into the dining-room to ask about certain dainties which she had ordered from town for Mabin’s benefit, but which had failed to arrive that morning, the girl was left in a state of happy excitement, thinking what a picture the little golden-haired creature had made as she sat curled up on the sofa, and wondering how she could have been so ungrateful as to imagine she could be anything but happy under the same roof with Mrs. Dale.