The girl looked about her with much interest. It was a poor little room enough, but clean and sunny. Oilcloth covered the floor, with an occasional cheap rug stranded here and there. White lace curtains draped the little bow window, and a struggling geranium wrestled with existence in too small a pot, with pale, caked earth, on a little flower-stand with a green woolly mat. The inevitable horsehair sofa and chairs predominated, covered with the equally inevitable white cotton crochet antimacassars, and a hideously designed clock ticked harshly on the little shiny black mantelpiece, behind which a wonderfully dim and speckled mirror had its place. Upon the walls hung photographs of Mrs. Walters at all ages, sometimes alone, sometimes one of a self-conscious group, attired in ugly large-hipped costumes. "I don’t put many ornaments on the mantelpiece, Miss," the landlady explained. "The young gentlemen likes to sit in them easy chairs, and to put their feet on it." She pointed out two chairs that looked to Hazel something misnamed, seeing that they were shiny and slippery and studded here and there with bristles, with a large lumpy dent in the centre of each. A small sideboard, rather overloaded with wax fruit under glass cases, stood against the wall opposite the fireplace—Hazel suspected that some of these "ornaments" had given way to the feet, now absent—and a round table occupied the middle of the room. "I suppose they have meals here?" Hazel asked, regarding it critically. "Breakfast and dinner, Miss; late dinner, if you please. They get their lunches out." "Yes, I know," Hazel told her; "but I mean, do they dine at _this_ table?" The piece of furniture in question, though standing straight, somehow gave one the impression of ricketiness, and the girl’s warm heart was yearning over the comfort of her brothers. "Oh yes, Miss; and there is room and to spare on it, now that Mr. Hugh is gone—_he_ would always have the plant-stand drawn up for the potatoes or the second vegetable." "I cannot stay long," Hazel announced; "I must not keep my uncle waiting, but I wanted to ask you a thing or two: I know you won’t mind. Are their appetites good?" Mrs. Walters raised her hands and eyes to the ceiling, smoke-begrimed above the gas bracket. "I have never known their like for eating," she declared solemnly. "I have a small appetite myself," she went on conversationally, bringing her eyes to the level of Hazel’s face, and her hands to her sides, "a little I must have, but not enough to choke the system." Hazel looked aghast. "But do my brothers choke their systems?" she asked, somewhat startled. "No, Miss," the woman returned, hastening to reassure her visitor. "Oh no, but sometimes I can’t but think it would not take much more. But there," she added, "it may be that I take so little myself." "Yet you are not thin," the girl observed with kindly interest.