"Did you ever hear any thing so atrocious!" exclaimed Patty, as the maid-servant disappeared round the corner of the house. "The way she talks about that funeral is more crazy than her usual speeches, and that is certainly needless." "Don't names," Flossy asked pensively, "always convey a color to your mind, Mr. Blood?" "Convey a color?" "Yes. Like Caroline, you know: that always makes me think of pale yellow, and Susan of red, and Mary of blue." "What nonsense!" laughed her cousin. "What color would Bathalina suggest?" "That name," said Flossy, "always calls up a grayish, dirty green, like faded linsey-woolsey." And at that moment the dinner-bell rang. CHAPTER X. A CHANCE MEETING. The Putnam mansion, wherein the lawyer's ancestors had lived and died for several generations, stood next to the cottage of Dr. Sanford; or rather the two places were back to back, each facing one of the two principal of the village streets. To reach either house from the more distant thoroughfare, a short cut was taken across the grounds of the other, right-of-way being conceded by mutual agreement. People in Montfield retired early; and thus it happened that at ten o'clock of the Friday night following the coming of grandmother Sanford the lights were out in the doctor's cottage, and sleep was supposed to have descended upon all the dwellers therein. Patty had not, however, retired. A thunder-storm was slowly rising out of the west, with golden fringes of lightning about its dark edges; and she sat at her open window to watch its progress. The unusual restraint imposed upon her by her lameness had made her restless; and she longed to steal out of the house, and run races across the orchard as she had done when a child. The sultry closeness of the night made her take a fan, with which she did little but tap impatiently upon the window-ledge. She was not thinking connectedly, but in a vague way unpleasant thoughts and feelings crowded tumultuously through her brain like the crew of Comus. Suddenly in the garden below she heard voices. A man was speaking earnestly, but in a tone too low to be audible at the window above. A woman answered him, the pair seeming to discuss something with much emphasis. Her curiosity greatly excited by so unusual a circumstance, Patty leaned out of the window to discover, if possible, who were the speakers. "Well, it's the Lord's will," she heard the woman's voice say. "And I, for one, ain't a-going to run a muck agin it." "It is Bathalina!" the listener said to herself. "Who in the world can she be talking to?"