The house was to be as nearly finished as possible by the beginning of winter. She wrote to her mother’s sister, Miss Huldah Starbruck, a lady who had passed fifty peaceful years in Nantucket, and asked her to come and live with her. Miss Starbruck promised to come early in December, and then, all other points settled, Hermia gave her attention to the momentous question of her undeveloped beauty. She went to a fashionable physician and had a long interview with him. The next day he sent her a trained and athletic nurse, a pleasant, placid-looking young woman, named Mary Newton. Miss Newton, who had received orders to put Hermia into a perfect state of health, and who was given carte blanche, telegraphed for a cottage on the south shore of Long Island. She had a room fitted up as a gymnasium, and for the next four months Hermia obeyed her lightest mandate upon all questions of diet and exercise. Once a week Hermia went to town and divided the day between the house-decorators and a hairdresser who had engaged to develop the color in her lusterless locks. On the first of December, Miss Newton told her that no girl had ever been in more superb condition; and Hermia, who had kept her vow and not yet looked in a mirror, was content to take her word, and both returned to town. * * * * * CHAPTER VIII. HERMIA DISCOVERS HERSELF. Had Hermia been a bride on her wedding-night she could not have felt more trepidation than when she stood on the threshold of her first interview with her new self. She was to meet a strange, potent being, who would unlock for her those doors against which, with fierce, futile longing, she had been wont to cast herself, since woman’s instinct had burst its germ. She entered her bedroom and locked the door. But she did not go to the mirror at once; she was loath to relinquish pleasurable uncertainty. She sank on a rug before the hearth and locked her hands about her knee in the attitude which had been a habit from childhood. For a few moments she sat enjoying the beauty of the room, the successful embodiment of one of her dearest dreams. The inlaid floor was thick with rugs that had been woven in the looms of the Orient. The walls were hung with cloth of gold, and the ceiling was a splendid picture of Nautch girls dancing in the pleasure palace of an Indian prince. The bed, enameled to represent ivory, stood on a dais over which trailed a wonderful Hindoo shawl. Over the couches and divans were flung rich stuffs, feathered rugs, and odd strips of Indian conceits. The sleeping-room was separated from the boudoir by a row of pillars, and from the unseen apartment came the smell of burning incense.