“Of course, you’ll go,” Paul said, dropping the silk and throwing around her shoulders the shawl which had been his choice in Cairo. “Look in the glass and see if it isn’t a beauty.” Miss Hansford admitted that it was a beauty, but on a very homely old stick, and Paul knew by her voice that the chords which had been a little out of tune were in harmony again. Suddenly it occurred to her that as she had not breakfasted, probably Paul had not either, and she urged him to stay, but he declined. He was to leave on the next boat, and there were some things he must attend to at the house. He should come to Oak City again in a few days, he said, and then bade her good-bye, while she folded up the shawl and dress, admiring the latter greatly, wondering if it were quite right for one who professed what she did to wear so expensive a silk, and if she were not backsliding a little. She did a good many things now which she would not have done when she first became a resident of the place. The world and the flesh were crowding her to the wall, and the devil, too, she sometimes feared, but she would keep her silk gown in spite of them all, and as she put it away in her bureau drawer she thought that as none of her immediate friends had anything like it they might disapprove. “I don’t care much if they do. They haven’t chances to see things as I have,” she said, with a degree of complacency which would have amused one who knew that her superior chances “to see things” were comprised in the week she had spent in Boston years ago, and her frequent visits to the Ralston House, where, on Paul’s account, she was always a welcome guest. And now the good days were drawing to a close, for Paul was going to be married. This in itself was bad enough, for with a wife he could never be the same to her, but worse than that, he was to marry Clarice Percy. This tarnished the lustre of the grey silk from Paris and marred the day she had thought so bright in the early morning. “I’ve lost my boy,” she said, sadly, as she watched the boat which was taking Paul away, and on the upper deck of which he stood waving his umbrella towards her. She didn’t wave back, but raised her hands in a kind of benediction and looked after him with an indefinable yearning until he was hidden from view. Her bones were in full swing this morning, and as she resumed her work she soliloquized, “I don’t know what ails me, but I feel that something bad will come of this marriage. How can it be otherwise? I know it is mean, and may be wicked, but I can’t abide the Percys.” CHAPTER IV. THE PERCYS.