The hall of Miss Minion's house smelled terribly of cooking that night as I passed through it. Standing at last in my own narrow room, I brought my clinched fist down on my table as I registered my vow that I would attain to her world. Then I sank down and covered my face with my hands, for out of the little frame Gladys Todd was looking at me. CHAPTER XVII When I sat again on the great divan, I said to myself that, after all, the alien mind who designed this room had worked with cunning; he must have seen in his fancy the very picture that was now so delightful to my eyes--the gray old fireplace with its tall columns wound with vines whose delicate leaves quivered as the firelight fanned them; before it Penelope, a slender figure, softly drawn in the evening's shadow, bent over the low tea-table as she worked with the rebellious lamp; from above, looking down kindly, half smiling, Reynolds's majestic lady, frilled and furbelowed; at her feet a giant white bear, its long claws gripping the polished floor, its jaws distended fiercely as though it stood guard, ready to spring at him who dared to cross the charmed circle drawn by the glowing coals. I sat in the half-darkness, for it was late in the day, and but a single shaded lamp burned in a distant corner. What was new in the room grew old under the wizard touch of shadows. The mahogany bookcases stretched away on either hand, and there were cobwebs on the diamond panes and dust on the ancient tomes. Penelope was in her home! A hundred years ago that majestic lady in frills and furbelows sat by this same fireplace, in that same old carved chair, making tea, and now she smiled with great content as from her frame she looked down on this child of her blood and bone. And the ancestor who had gathered those dusty volumes--what of him? Two hundred years it was, perhaps, since he had burrowed among the cobwebs, now caressing his rare old Horace, now turning the yellow pages of his learned treatise on astrology. He was a distinguished figure in his wig, his velvet coat and smallclothes, and something of his features, refined by intellectual pursuit, I read in the face that now was turned to mine. For blood does tell. Father Time is a reckless artist, clipping and cutting and recasting incessantly, and producing an appalling number of failures; but now and then it would seem that he did take some pains and, studying his models, combine the broad, low brow of this one with another's straight and finely chiselled nose, and still another's smoothly rounded cheek; and sometimes, in his cynical way, he will spoil it all with a pair of coarse hands borrowed from one of his rustic figures or the large, flat feet of some study of peasant life, which we should have thought cast away and forgotten. In Penelope we were offended by none of these grotesque fragments. They must have been long since cleared out of her ancestral line. When she