The two ladies were in the double parlor on the left of the wide hall of No 15. It was a gloomy place, even when the ailanthus-trees had lost their leaves; the French windows were so smothered in plush and lace that the gleam of narrow mirrors between them could not lighten the costly ugliness. In its day the room had been very costly. The carpet, with its scrolls and garlands, the ebony cabinets, picked out in gilt--big and foolish and empty--the oil-paintings in vast, tarnished frames, must all have been very expensive. There was an ormolu clock on the black marble mantelpiece holding Time stationary at 7.20 o'clock of some forgotten morning or evening; the bronzes on either side of it--a fisher-maid with her string of fish, and a hunter bearing an antelope on his shoulders--were dulled by the smoky years. Opposite the fireplace, against the chocolate-brown wall-paper, Andrew Payton, on a teakwood pedestal, glimmered in white marble blindness. Beside him, the key-board of a grand piano was yellowing in untouched silence. The room was so dim that Mrs. Holmes, coming in out of the sunshine, stumbled over a rug. "You have such a clutter of things, Ellen," she complained, sharply. "It's lighter up-stairs," Mrs. Payton defended herself. "What did you say? Do speak more distinctly!" "I said it was lighter up-stairs. Come up, and I'll show you a puzzle I've just worked out. Dreadfully difficult!" But Mrs. Holmes never went up-stairs in the Payton house; to be sure, the door between the sitting-room and the room beyond it was always locked, but--_you heard things_. So she said she couldn't climb the stairs. "I'm getting old, I'm afraid," she said, archly. "I suppose you are very rheumatic?" her daughter sympathized; "why don't you try--" "Not at all!" the older lady interrupted; "just a little stiff. Mrs. Dale said her cousin thought you were my sister," she added, maliciously. As far as clothes went, the cousin might have supposed Mrs. Holmes was Mrs. Payton's daughter--the skirt in the latest ugliness of style, the high heels, the white veil over the elaborate hair, were all far more youthful than the care-worn mother of Frederica (and Mortimore) would have permitted herself. "I've been so dreadfully busy," Mrs. Holmes declared; "I meant to come in yesterday, but I had a thousand things to do! Bridge all afternoon at Bessie Childs's. I played with young Mrs. Dale. She ought to get another dressmaker." "Did you know Mr. Dale's aunt was dying?" Mrs. Payton said.