“I wonder what he meant! I feel exactly as if somebody would come out from town to-day—it’s such a lovely morning.” She spoke half aloud as she looked down the street through the green feathery foliage of the elms, just out in their spring dress. The sun shone caressingly through them upon the crocuses peeping out in the front grass-plot, and the air, delicately cool, was charged with perfume. There were all the usual adjuncts of spring in the suburbs. A department store wagon was already delivering parcels at a house further down, and several women, fresh and neatly gloved, were alertly stepping trainward to get an early start for the day’s shopping, impelled thither by that soft breeze which woos womankind to the pursuit of clothes. All down the block the palms and rubber plants were being sunned on piazza steps, the former, for the most part, conspicuously brown and withered, but the latter still chunkily green after a winter of furnace heat and dust and gas. To feel the spring air and not want to spend money was impossible even to Mildred Thatcher, but even if she could have purchased the rug so badly needed for the little drawing-room she would not leave home to-day. She was sure some one would be out from town. She turned now to the maid and gave her orders for luncheon. “You can make the cold meat into croquettes, Kitty, and we’ll have pop-overs. And I’d like you to wash out the violet centerpiece.” “Very well, ma’am.” The hint of a pending pleasure had set its seal on the day. It might be Madge Stanfield who would come, or the Laviers, or her Cousin Lou. She set things to rights, and dusted and arranged daintily, and put fresh violets in the glass vases, and by and by, late in the morning, when all was done, went out on the piazza to listen for the train, while deciding whether or no to send her dwindling palms to the florist. She scrutinized the rubber plant anxiously for some sign of growth. The rubber plant was, in a way, a proof of the demoralizing extremes of Mildred’s nature. For a season she had railed intemperately at rubber plants and their possessors, and then, after moving from a flat to the suburbs, had incontinently gone forth one morning on the spur of the moment and bought one. It somehow didn’t seem as if they were really householders without that green and visible emblem of a much-enduring domesticity. Mrs. Thatcher cherished an idea that her rubber plant would grow with tropical luxuriance, but as yet it had only remained stolidly green. “Good-morning!” It was a neighbour, who, deflecting from the pavement, came up, with a paper bag in one hand, to lean familiarly against the post at the foot of the low steps. “Your plants need water,” she continued, casting an officially critical eye upon them. “They were watered this morning,” said Mrs. Thatcher.