Opposite the deep old arm-chair in which she was reclining, a table had been laid with a clean white cloth, and a little tea-kettle was singing merrily beside a simple supper of cold meats, set out with a dainty neatness that almost amounted to elegance. An arm-chair had been drawn close to the single cover. There was no other symptom of petticoat government in that large low room. Discolored copper-plates, sketches in oils, fragments of antique marbles, covered the walls, and lay about encumbering the furniture, in artistical confusion. An old stove of green potter; had been crowned by a Corinthian capital, blackened by the smoke and dust of years. Now, at this quiet hour of the night, when the lamp in the centre left the comers of the room in darkness, this motley assemblage almost haunted one. The most incongruous things had been placed so close together, as to make them all look strange. The clock struck eleven. With a movement of impatience, the young woman rose, and throwing down the little blue volume of which she had been absently turning over the leaves, she went to the window and looked out. Her earliest youth was past, and her countenance bore the stamp of a resolute soul, that has suffered, and struggled, and ended by becoming indifferent to evanescent charms. Yet if you looked longer at that serious face, you could see that such charms had been intended for it when Nature cast those features; but that life and fate had been too hard for her, and blighted their original promise. Eyes and brow were of the purest cut; the contour of cheek and throat was broad and sweeping. Even a slight trace of the small-pox here and there, had not deteriorated from the delicacy of her profile. One breath of youthfulness, of gladness, of carelessness, and that severe mouth would have softened into loveliness. Even now, her countenance completely changed, as her watchful ear at last discerned the echo of a footstep on the pavement, coming up to the door, and a suppressed voice, humming a valse tune, as the key was being turned in the lock. "At last!" she murmured, as she drew back from the window; "and late enough;--and what can make him sing? A glass too much, perhaps, and for all my pains and patience, I shall only have to preach him sober." She listened to the step upon the stairs, it was steady, elastic, noiseless. "Not so bad after all," she said, with a sigh of relief, "but that he should have taken to singing--?" The door opened, and a fine-grown young fellow of about nineteen came in, with a kindly salutation.