He would have cared less, no doubt, to make himself not too dull company for this stranger, had he known that there, before that fireplace, a few days before, she had been placed in possession of the most intimate facts of his humiliating destiny. Unsuspecting, in a mood rather more amiable than usual, he asked, by way of entering into conversation, whether she and her friend were not New-Englanders. It established the sense of a bond, however light, to find that they and he were almost townsmen. He had been born in Boston, or, at least, near it. His parents had owned a house in Charlestown, where he had lived till he was ten years old. They talked for a while of Boston. He had heard a singular thing, he said, she might be able to tell him how true: that in Boston a new medical method had arisen by which the sick were said to be made well without the help of drugs. Mind cure, he believed it was called. It seemed very extraordinary, and rather interesting, if it were not all a fraud or a fable, that persons of the most prosaic, as these had been described to him, should go about professing to do for a fee the same thing that saints of old are recorded to have done through their mysterious powers. The subject had come into his mind--he went on making conversation--from recently re-reading a book of George Sand's, _La Petite Fadette_, in which a cure is performed which seemed to him very similar. If she had not read the book, she must permit him to bring it for her perusal. He talked about the book. A maid brought in a lighted lamp, and, as is the pleasant custom of the country, wished them a happy evening. Very soon after it came Aurora, with a dab of flour on one cheek, which the kitchen fire had warmed to a deeper pink. "There," she said, "they're all ready for the oven. When we took the house, all the stove we had was a big stone block thing with little square holes. The cook fanned them with a turkey-wing. But now we've got a range. Don't you want me to show you over the house? There'll be just time before supper." "I'm afraid it's all dark," said Estelle. "Let me ring and have them light up. Think of a city house without gas!" "No, they'd be too long. I can take a lamp." She went for it to her dressing-room, and came back with one easy to carry, long in the stem and small in the tank, from which, to make it brighter, she had lifted off the shade. Gerald reached to take it from her, but she refused his help. "The weight's nothing. I want you to be free to look around. Coming, Estelle?" "I'll join you in a minute." They went down the wide stairs side by side. She led through a door, at the right, as you entered the house, of the main door. "Here's one of the parlors. We have four on this floor, between big and little. Four parlors and a dining-room. Doesn't that seem a good many for two lone women?"