in a back street of ’Quawket for three months of suffering and helplessness. The company went its way and left her, and went to pieces in the end. The greater part of her poor savings went for the expenses of her sickness. At last, when the critical period was over, her doctor got some charitably-disposed ladies and gentlemen interested in her case; and, between them all, they procured admission to the Old Ladies’ Home for a poor, white-haired, half-palsied wreck of a woman, who not only was decrepit before her time, but who acted decrepitude so successfully that nobody thought of asking her if she were less than eighty years old. I do not mean to say that Mrs. Fortescue willfully deceived her benefactors: she was old--oldish, anyway--she was helpless, partially paralyzed, and her system was permeated with lead; but when she came to add to this the correct dramatic outfit of expression, she was _so_ old, and _so_ sick, and so utterly miserable and stricken and done for that the hearts of the managers of the Old Ladies’ Home were opened, and they took her in at half the usual entrance fee; because, as the matron very thoughtfully remarked, she couldn’t possibly live six weeks, and it was just so much clear gain for the institution. By the end of six weeks, however, Mrs. Fortescue was just as well as she had ever been in her life, and was acting about twice as healthy as she felt. [Illustration] With her trim figure, her elastic step, and her beautiful white hair setting off her rosy cheeks--and Mrs. Fortescue knew how to have rosy cheeks whenever she wanted them--she certainly was an incongruous figure in an Old Ladies’ Home, and it was no wonder that her presence made the genuine old ladies genuinely mad. And every day of her stay they got madder and madder; for by the constitution of the Home, an inmate might, if dissatisfied with her surroundings, after a two-years’ stay, withdraw from the institution, _taking her entrance fee with her_. And that was why Mrs. Fortescue staid on in the Old Ladies’ Home, snubbed, sneered at, totally indifferent to it all, eating three square meals a day, and checking off the dull but health-giving weeks that brought her nearer to freedom, and the comfortable little nest-egg with which she meant to begin life again. And yet the time came when Mrs. Fortescue’s histrionic capacity won for her, if not a friend, at least an ally, out of the snarling sisterhood; and for a few brief months there was just one old woman out of the lot who was decently civil to her, and who even showed rudimentary systems of polite intentions. * * * * * This old woman was Mrs. Filley, and this was the manner of her modification.