"Perfectly clear. Goodnight," Amherst answered, as he turned to follow Mrs. Truscomb. * * * * * That same evening, four persons were seated under the bronze chandelier in the red satin drawing-room of the Westmore mansion. One of the four, the young lady in widow's weeds whose face had arrested Miss Brent's attention that afternoon, rose from a massively upholstered sofa and drifted over to the fireplace near which her father sat. "Didn't I tell you it was awful, father?" she sighed, leaning despondently against the high carved mantelpiece surmounted by a bronze clock in the form of an obelisk. Mr. Langhope, who sat smoking, with one faultlessly-clad leg crossed on the other, and his ebony stick reposing against the arm of his chair, raised his clear ironical eyes to her face. "As an archæologist," he said, with a comprehensive wave of his hand, "I find it positively interesting. I should really like to come here and dig." There were no lamps in the room, and the numerous gas-jets of the chandelier shed their lights impartially on ponderously framed canvases of the Bay of Naples and the Hudson in Autumn, on Carrara busts and bronze Indians on velvet pedestals. "All this," murmured Mr. Langhope, "is getting to be as rare as the giant sequoias. In another fifty years we shall have collectors fighting for that Bay of Naples." Bessy Westmore turned from him impatiently. When she felt deeply on any subject her father's flippancy annoyed her. "_You_ can see, Maria," she said, seating herself beside the other lady of the party, "why I couldn't possibly live here." Mrs. Eustace Ansell, immediately after dinner, had bent her slender back above the velvet-covered writing-table, where an inkstand of Vienna ormolu offered its empty cup to her pen. Being habitually charged with a voluminous correspondence, she had foreseen this contingency and met it by despatching her maid for her own writing-case, which was now outspread before her in all its complex neatness; but at Bessy's appeal she wiped her pen, and turned a sympathetic gaze on her companion. Mrs. Ansell's face drew all its charm from its adaptability. It was a different face to each speaker: now kindling with irony, now gently maternal, now charged with abstract meditation--and few paused to reflect that, in each case, it was merely the mirror held up to some one else's view of life. "It needs doing over," she admitted, following the widow's melancholy glance about the room. "But you are a spoilt child to complain. Think of having a house of your own to come to, instead of having to put up at the Hanaford hotel!" Mrs. Westmore's attention was arrested by the first part of the reply. "Doing over? Why in the world should I do it over? No one could expect me to come here _now_--could they, Mr. Tredegar?" she exclaimed, transferring her appeal to the fourth member of the party.