A public carriage drove up the street and stopped at the Bristead door. Beth drew a quick, gasping, inward breath. “Aunt Rebecca,” she said low, but with an intensity that made her voice perfectly audible in the next room where her great-aunt was cutting out work for the sewing society, “Aunt Rebecca, she has come! Oh, is that a maid?” she added. For Beth saw a tall person descend from the carriage, pay the driver and turn toward the house. She was clad in taffeta so shining that she looked like a perfectly new, very good quality of stove-pipe; the gown fell around her in such unwrinkled stiffness that it increased the stove-pipe likeness. Her hair was black, so smooth and solid in effect that it carried out the suggestion of her being made of sheet iron. She moved with great dignity, and looked the brown house up and down with an air so superior that Beth felt a sudden fear of her. She could not have told what she had expected a lady’s maid to be like, but certainly not like this alarming person. Ella Lowndes, who was Aunt Rebecca’s “help,” opened the door. “Come in,” Beth heard her say. “Miss Bristead’s in, yes, and the little girl is all ready to start away with you.” “You’d better lay off your things,” Beth heard Aunt Rebecca saying. “I’ll see that you have luncheon right away. This is Elizabeth Bristead, Mr. Cortlandt’s niece, who is going back with you,” she added as Beth came shyly forth from her observation post by the window. “How do you do, Miss Elizabeth?” said the maid with an unexpected touch of Irish in her speech. Beth had never known any one with that accent who was not jolly, and the maid looked more serious--and older--at close range than when she had come up the walk. “No, Miss Bristead, thank you, I don’t care about any luncheon,” she went on. “I came right out here from Boston--I was over night there--and if you don’t mind there’s a train back at half-past eleven I’d like to be takin’. Then we’d catch the mid-afternoon New York express to New York, and be gettin’ there early in the evenin’. I don’t want to be hurryin’ you, but if Miss Elizabeth is really ready--Mrs. Cortlandt asked me to make the best time I could; she’ll be missin’ me if I’m gone a second night from her. They was goin’ to send up the motor car for me to bring the young lady on in it, but Mr. Cortlandt ran down to Lakewood to a speed thrial his club has to-day. He took the small car, but he wouldn’t let any shoffer but Mr. Léon Charette run it for ’um, and there’s no other he would thrust to bring the big car up here after the little girl, so I took the train.” Aunt Rebecca almost gasped, Beth actually gasped; Aunt Rebecca because this torrent of words overwhelmed her; Beth because she had no idea what these words were all about. If the maid had said “chauffeur” instead of “shoffer” Beth would still have been in the dark as to her unknown uncle’s reasons for letting his niece come to him by train.