"Then, dear, don't think about thanks. You are quite a pleasant surprise visitor to us--lonely people; to me and my two little shy nieces, who will be the better for having a little girl friend. Let me introduce you; they're on the very tip-toe of waiting." Then the two wee maidens came round from behind their aged relative's chair, and were introduced as Olive and Sybil. Two dark-haired, brown-skinned damsels were they, in quaintly cut velvet frocks, with frillings of lace at throat and wrists. "Now see, dear, it's pouring with rain. Do you think you could be happy as our guest to-day, or must I send you home in the carriage?" questioned Madame Giche. They were in what was called the tapestried chamber, a room lined with needlework, done by dead fingers of long ago: those of some of the ladies whose portraits Inna was to see by-and-by in the grand staircase, and the gallery running round the hall. "I should like--what would you like me to do, ma'am?" faltered Inna. "We should much like you to stay, dear," returned Madame Giche, still holding her hand. "Then, thank you, I should like to stay." So it was decided, and Olive and Sybil, the twin sisters, drew away their guest to look at pretty foreign ornaments, in profusion all about the room. "All grand-auntie's own," as they told her, "which we brought from abroad. You see, this isn't our own home, but grand-auntie took it on lease from a gentleman we met abroad. Grand-auntie has lived abroad for years and years, ever since her heart was broken." So they chatted, and enlightened Inna. This was in the afternoon, after they had lunched with Madame Giche in the tapestried room, and had wandered away up into the picture-gallery, to look at some of the pictures. "There, that is grand-auntie; isn't it like? That was done abroad," said Sybil, who was the talker. Olive was sedate and somewhat silent. There was no mistaking the sweet aged face peering down at them from the canvas, and Inna said so. "And that is grand-auntie's son--he who broke her heart, you know. He disappointed her, went abroad, married, and died," whispered the child. "Ah! whisper it," so she expressed it, "because it is all so sad. Grand-auntie was never reconciled to him, you see, and so can never make it up in this world. He had a wife and a little boy, and grand-auntie has searched Europe over, she says, and can't find them." A dark, handsome, wilful young face had Madame Giche's son, as seen in his portrait--a young man just on the threshold of manhood. Inna stood to gaze at it, wondering what it was stirring the depths of her sensitive little heart, and filling it with a lingering pain. "Grand-auntie says these two pictures have no right here, and calls them alien pictures among aliens, because the house isn't ours and the pictures don't rightly belong here; but she took her son's portrait with her in all her travels, and her own was done abroad, and of course she brought them here."