Before a reply could be given, the bedroom door opened with fracas, and aunt Sylvia suddenly appeared. She was totally different in appearance to her sister. Dorcas was plump, good-tempered, meek-looking, about forty-five years of age. Sylvia was some five years her senior; a little, thin, sharp-faced woman--one whose very dress looked meagre; not the richest brocade could appear rich on so shapeless an anatomy; it would trail on the ground, limp, and disheartened from any attempt to look well. She had the strangest eyes in the world--a dark, dingy, chestnut brown, of which the pupil was certainly not larger than a pin's head; thin nose, thin lips, thin hair, hands, and voice, completed aunt Sylvia--with the addition of the very thinnest mind in the world. It was like a screw-press; put any thing bulky within it, it was compressed _instanter_ to a mummy, and thence doled out in such small particles, that it was inevitably lost in the general mass of which aunt Sylvia was formed. "I declare, Minnie," she whistled forth in her shrilly tone, "you would provoke a saint; here have I been calling you at the top of my voice this hour, and you must have heard me! Really, Dorcas, it is too bad; you always encourage the child--you, too, must have heard me." "I have only been here a few moments," placidly answered her sister. "Then your conversation must have been most engrossing, for such deafness to have fallen upon you!" and she looked suspiciously from one to the other. "We were speaking of----"