His mother and sisters sailed in May. It was now July, and very warm and disagreeable. As the “heated term” set in, he began to think it too bad, you know, of mamma and the girls to remain abroad for three whole years. It was positively absurd. What was he to do? After the house was let—where was he to go? By Jove, he felt deuced lonely, don’t you know! It was especially trying for a sensitive man to go in and out of a house with a great placard on it, “To Let, Furnished,” but it was a deal more trying to have people come and want board. Yes, actually, two ladies came one morning and wanted to know if they could see the landlord. It was positively ridiculous! His agent was a clevah fellow, but even he gave up hope of letting the house until fall. Hadn’t he better run down to Newport? He got a letter from Dick Trellis that morning, and they really didn’t see how they were going to get on without him in the polo matches. It put him in a fuming fury. He had never stayed late in the city in summer before. How infernally hot it was—and nahsty—don’t you know! His collars were in a perpetual state of wilt—they never wilted at Newport. Then everybody was not only out of town, having a good time somewhere, but they had a provoking way now of ostentatiously boarding up their front-doors—yes—and their windows, too—which made it doubly disagreeable for those who had to remain. It was bad enough to see the blinds drawn down, but boxing up their stonework and planking up their front-doors caused Mr. Jerome Archibald unutterable pangs. Then they thought it was a boarding-house! _They_ were coming again in the afternoon, at four. There were two of them—ladies. In his rather depressing and solitary occupation of living alone in his house, with one solemn apoplectic cook and one chalk-faced maid, in order to exhibit it to that endless raft of females with “permits,” who universally condemned or “damned with faint praise” his father’s exquisite taste in rugs and furniture, Mr. Jerome Archibald had to-day admitted to himself a distinct pleasure in showing “Miss Perkins” and her niece (whose name did not happen at the time to be mentioned) over the house, and pointing out in his quiet way its excellences. They saw the sign, they said, and so made bold to enter. Evidently Miss Perkins was a prim, thin, tall, spectacled, New England old maid. She had the delicate air and manner of a lady. A lady faded, perhaps, and unused to a larger social area than that surrounding her native village green. She had also the timid manner of hesitancy of New England spinsters—hesitancy concerning everything except questions of casuistry and religion—and seemed, in what she did, to be spurred on from behind by the niece, who was, on the whole, as Mr. Jerome Archibald told a friend at the club later, “quite extraordinary.” In the first place, as he said, the niece was undeniably beautiful.