Kitty had been absent all the morning, having been detailed for some pressing laundry work by the practical Mrs. Roberts, for which I was still owing her a grudge, when, just as I awoke from my nap, she walked in, and accepting the chair I offered her, made me quite a little visit. I exerted myself to appear amiable, and was congratulating myself on the success of my efforts, and on the absence of all disagreeable topics, when, just as she was going, her keen eyes having made the circuit of the room many times, she detected something amiss in the bed, and walking across to the recess where it stood, began to examine the manner in which it was made. "That Kitty," she said, "was not to be trusted to make even a bed by herself. She was sure I did not lie comfortably." And stooping down, she began to dissect it. My heart gave a spasmodic thump, and then stood "stock-still for sheer amazement," not to say consternation, when it flashed across me that I had left the guilty miniature between the mattresses, where, in the sleepless nervousness of last night, I had put it, in order to have it as far out of the way as possible. It was the strangest thing that I should never have thought of it since I waked up. "And now," I thought, with a cold chill, "now it is probably under Mrs. Roberts' very nose, and Kitty and I are undone." I hardly breathed as I watched her throwing back blanket and sheet, and making sad havoc among the bolsters and pillows, giving the one a contemptuous shake, and the other an indignant poke; all the while most animatedly anathematizing the the unlucky Kitty. I had already pictured Kitty and myself dragged by the hair of our guilty heads, before Mr. Rutledge, for judgment, and terrified into confession by that awful look of his, when to my unspeakable relief, Mrs. Roberts stopped just short of the mattress, and coming indignantly across the room, rang for Kitty, who promptly answered the bell. She looked somewhat blank to find that the summons was not to dress me, but to stand one of Mrs. Roberts' tirades. Mrs. Roberts was, I believe, troubled with rheumatism, "the worst kind," and the cold storm and east wind had aggravated these long-tried enemies to an unbearable pitch, and it was well known in the house that there was but one remedy that succeeded in the least in allaying the irritation of her nerves, but one soothing panacea, and that was, a thorough and satisfactory "blow-out" or scolding; the raking fore-and-aft some adversary's craft with the unerring fire of her indignation, the entire annihilation, soul and body, for the time being, of the victim that happened first to cross her path. And tradition pointed to Kitty as the favorite scape-goat on these occasions. She knew her fate, I am certain, from the moment she caught the dull glare of Mrs. Roberts' eye, and doggedly tossing her pretty head to one side, stood ready to confront her.