As one moon after another waxed baby-faced and then pined away to a wan shadow the friends became more inseparable than ever. And, behold! seeing these things, all the masculine boarders and the "girls" of the manor-house looked at each other obliquely with an expression that consorts best with paganism and pig-tails, while the lady-boarders smiled with that exasperating significance which when given to one's own affairs makes one yearn for the smiler's scalp. But in spite of these oblique glances and significant smiles, in spite of everything indicative of the contrary, they were not an atom in love with each other. Unless they both of them fibbed! Which young people in their circumstances were never known to do. Nevertheless, one day Annie Deane was sitting in an embrasured window writing, school-girl fashion, upon an atlas in her lap. She wore a blue gingham dress in the style of a loose blouse. The skirt was short, and had no scruples about revealing two nicely-booted feet crossed one over the other, the toe of one pointing to the zenith, the other toward the coast of Europe. This was her sketching-costume, and she had not found time to change it for the more conventional one in which she usually took tea, as she was hurrying to finish a letter in time for the butcher, who would soon pass by on his return from Mansfield, to take to the post-office at Baysville. The room was spacious, and tried its best to be gloomy. The canopied bed against the wall was hung with funereal drapery, and reminded one somehow of a _Cinque-cento_ tomb. When an occupant was extended there the resemblance could not but be dolorously striking. A tremendous old chest of drawers opposite, mighty among furniture as Goliath among men, hung its brass rings massively downward; and I was forcibly reminded of that chest of drawers the other day when I saw how the sainted dead of imperial Rome were packed away in the Catacombs of St. Calixtus. Imagine a chest of drawers which gives an impression that upon pulling its brass rings one will see, not dainty garments frothy with lace and ruffles, but a spectacle of rich animal mould and white holy bones! There were one or two dignified old chairs--judicial, majestic chairs, which evidently imagined that they impressed the vulgar radicals of this New World with the idea that in their own country they had been thrones or something of that sort. It was a most dignified and impressive room in spite of its rag carpet, its cane-seated rockers, camp-stools, books, the sketches pinned upon the walls, flowers, and all the odds and ends of feminine finery that betrayed the levity of its modern habit. That is, perhaps one might better say it would have been dignified and impressive had one ever been able to see it otherwise than as merely an architectural background, like the chairs behind Giovanni Bellini's gracious Madonnas, to the pretty picture of youth and content writing there by the seaward window. Everybody always