He loved to listen to the girl as she tripped through the great rooms, humming softly some air from Lennet's "London Song-Book"--one of the relics of his "ole Miss." Patricia always sang on the days when her sisters were visiting their aunts on the bluff. Juma loved her, and during his five years' residence in the family had many times taken her youthful mind in train with quaint eighteenth-century maxims and fetiches. "De wise miss drop her fan when she enters de ballroom," he would say. "Den she gets de men on der knees from de start." "I wish I were invited to balls," Patricia sighed. "The Kings and Grahams give one or two every year, but father never notices them." "Well, you jes' know how to behave," he chuckled. "Doan' yo' forget de tricks your Uncle Juma taught yo'." When the two had met in the attic that April day, Juma's spirits were as ebullient as usual. "How lovely she is, Juma! See, there is a blush on each cheek. Her pink brocade makes me think of a rose dancing in the wind." Patricia stared into the canvas face before her and the lips seemed to curve themselves into the shadow of a smile. "I know you were the fairest one of us," she whispered, "the fairest and the best." "Dat's the real quality way of holding the head," vouchsafed Juma. "I'se pow'ful 'clined to think she looks like yo', missy." And then they had laughed, shut away with maimed chairs, tired spinets, and other voiceless things, glad to have escaped from Knickerbocker frowns. [Illustration: "_How lovely she is, Juma!_"] It was a dismal household, that of the old mansion--the master absorbed in his passion for wealth and worship of family; the three eldest daughters, who might once have had some individuality but now were moulded in the form of their father. "Callow old maids," any individual of the lower ranks of York would have dubbed them. They wore little bunches of sedate curls over each ear, and dressed in sombre, genteel colors proper to their exalted rank. On the first day of the week they dozed through a long sermon; on its last day they simpered politely at the Whist Club. Fears of broken jelly-moulds or of the romping Patricia's next prank were the only disturbers of the tranquillity of their lives. Jonathan Knickerbocker was their one Almighty Mirror. When he labelled Mrs. Scruggins, the draper's niece, a person not fit to associate with, their stiff gowns obediently gave forth hisses at the said lady. When he prated of his father's shrewdness, they nodded discreet approval; and at the mere mention of the loyal friend of Lord Cornbury, they bobbed like grass before a gale.