She knew how one should look for dinner because there was Maman's portrait over the drawing-room fireplace, in the frock she'd worn when she had dined "with her family in France--" Mademoiselle had dressed Octavia for that wonderful party and she had never tired of telling Felicia how beautiful the eighteen-year Octavia had been. "It is a woman's duty to think of her charms," Mademoiselle had said, "that is what the husband of Julie, Madame Recamier, said, it is what Madame Louise taught Miss Octavia--" And so Felicia naively parted her hair and brushed it satin-smooth and coiled it neatly on the nape of her white neck with the same big carved coral Spanish comb tucked into the shining mass that Octavia had worn when she sat for the portrait. Sometimes she wore the lovely black lace shawl, sometimes the creamy white embroidered silk one, and always the delicate coral and silver jewelry. Yet she couldn't possibly have known from the pale image that stared back at her from the dim shimmer of the drawing-room mirrors, how exquisitely lovely she was, not even when the Major bent over her hand and said, as he had said so often to her mother, "You are very charming today, my dear!" He did not know himself, the grim old stoic, how much he adored her. At length there came a certain spring, seductive, too early warm, when the Major grew thoughtful, when Certain Legal Matters came frequently in the evening and left Felicia to ponder over her embroidery frame or wander restlessly in the bit of garden. She was seventeen now, a glowing, radiant seventeen, so divinely happy that the Major smiled whenever he looked at her. For it had come, the Beautiful, Wonderful time when they were going to the House in the Woods! Already the rooms were filled with trunks and packing boxes, Marthy and Zeb and the housemaids were sorting and folding incessantly. And around them, wandered, starry-eyed, a useless young person who hugged to her heart a joyous dream of a woman in a garden--a woman in a little lace cap and a trailing rose-colored dressing-gown, a woman who would say, "Oh Felicia! I hope you'll be happy today in the garden!" You mustn't blame the Major too much that he did not know what a cruel thing he had done--he did not even dream that Felicia believed she was going to find Octavia in the garden. Those long ago evasions that had silenced her little-girl questions he had forgotten. Indeed I think he never let himself remember those days in which the child had asked, "Where is she gone?" And so they had come to the last night of all, the night before they should start their journey. Inside the gloomy library grandfather and Certain Legal Matters discussed stupid details about where the furniture should go to storage and whether they should change the route and instead of going around the coast by steamer and down the St. Lawrence, travel part of the way overland--they consulted long yellow time-tables.