"It's these spoons," the old woman explained to Miss Deborah. "Mrs. Dale, she lent us a dozen. I've counted 'em all myself; I wouldn't trust 'em to that Sally. If there was a hair's difference, Mrs. Dale would know it 'fore she set eyes on them, let alone havin' one of our spoons 'stead of hers." Miss Deborah nodded her head. "Very likely, Jean," she said; "I've not a doubt of it. I'm going now, and Miss Lois will walk along with me. Yes, Mrs. Dale would see if anything was wrong, you can depend upon it." They set out together, Lois listening absently to Miss Deborah's chatter about the wedding, and vaguely glad when, at the gate of her aunt's house, she could leave her, with a pretty bow, which was half a courtesy. There was a depressing stateliness about Dale house, which was felt as soon as the stone gateway, with its frowning sphinxes, was passed. The long shutters on either side of the front door were always solemnly bowed, for Mrs. Dale did not approve of faded carpets, and the roof of the veranda, supported by great white pillars, darkened the second-story windows. There was no tangle of vines about its blank walls of cream-colored brick with white trimmings, nor even trees to soften the stare with which it surveyed the dusty highway; and the formal precision of the place was unrelieved by flowers, except for a stiff design in foliage plants on the perfectly kept lawn. On the eastern side of the house, about the deep windows of Mr. Dale's sanctum, ivy had been permitted to grow, and there were a few larch and beech trees, and a hedge to hide the stables; but these were special concessions to Mr. Dale. "I do dislike," said Mrs. Dale,--"I do dislike untidy gardens; flowers, and vines, and trees, all crowded together, and weeds too, if the truth's told. I never could understand how the Woodhouse girls could endure that forlorn old place of theirs. But then, a woman never does make a really good manager unless she's married." Lois found her aunt in the long parlor, playing Patience. She was sitting in a straight-backed chair,--for Mrs. Dale scorned the weakness of a rocking-chair,--before a spindle-legged table, covered with green baize and with a cherry-wood rim inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory. On it were thirteen groups of cards, arranged with geometrical exactness at intervals of half an inch. "Well, Lois," she said, as her niece entered. "Oh, you have brought the spoons back?" But she interrupted herself, her eyebrows knitted and her lower lip thrust out, to lift a card slowly, and decide if she should move it. Then she glanced at the girl over her glasses. "I'm just waiting here because I must go into the kitchen soon, and look at my cake. That Betty of mine must needs go and see her sick mother to-day, and I have to look after things. But I cannot be idle. I declare, there is something malicious in the way in which the relatives of servants fall ill!"