One does not know just how much of an explosion there would have been if the elder Miss Graham had not come to the rescue: "Ah, well, there are so many good reasons on both sides, that I'm glad I don't have to decide it!" Then she began to talk of old friends in Grafton; but, alas, as a subject Grafton, too, was somewhat dangerous; old Mr. So-and-so died two years ago; and Mrs. Black--did Mrs. Holmes remember Mrs. Black? "I am sorry to say she is very ill," Miss Mary said. The chatter of gossip was--as it so often is with age--a rehearsal of sickness and death. In the midst of it Mrs. Holmes clutched at a gold mesh-bag that was slipping from her steep lap, and tried to rise: "I think I must go. (Oh, do pick up that bag, Freddy dear.) I am too tender-hearted," she confessed, "I can't bear to hear unpleasant things!" "Well, let us talk of pleasant things," Miss Eliza said; but she looked at the frightened old face under the white veil;--"and 'the feet of the bearers' are coming nearer to her every day!" she thought. Mrs. Holmes sat down again, reluctantly. Of course, from the Misses Graham's point of view, there could be nothing pleasanter for a grandmother to hear than plaudits of Miss Freddy's efficiency; so they went back again to that. Dear Arthur had told them how hard she had worked (again Freddy's eyes rolled toward dear Arthur); engaging tradesmen, and making the landlord do the necessary repairing.--"Oh, my dear," Miss Mary interrupted herself, "I meant to warn you that one of your workmen left a half-smoked cigarette here. I knew you would want to reprove him. Dear me! in these days, with all the new ideas, the working-people are very careless. But I feel so strongly our responsibility to them, that I always tell them of their mistakes." "The working-people didn't make any mistake this time," Fred said; "you mustn't blame the plumber,"--the temptation to get back at her grandmother was too much for her--"it was my own cigarette." There was a stunned silence. "Howard Maitland and I were smoking here quite a while," she said, sweetly. "But I thought I'd aired the room out. I'm awfully sorry,--cigarette-smoke does hang about so." ("'Amusement'!" she was saying to herself; "I'll 'amuse' her!") But Mrs. Holmes was equal to the occasion. She shook an arch and knobby finger at her granddaughter. "Naughty girl! But that's one of the things that is done nowadays," she said; "ladies smoke just as much as gentlemen, don't they, Mr. Weston?"