old-time trinket would be priceless of a truth; and her pronunciation of certain words made her, as she talked, difficult to understand. Could she, he wistfully wondered, live in the house as it stood?--it being, as might have been made out, a puzzle to him to see her there so poorly convenienced, and yet not less a pain to equip her with a background of cosy corners or photographs framed in leather, of tailor-made ladies doing tricks with little dogs and gentlemen in tweed mixtures tilting back "good" chairs. The few portraits of men in the house were not sensibly superior to the three or four women's, besides being, in a couple of cases, of a date observably later; but they had alike that prime and sufficient property of the old portrait--they had, as Ralph put it to himself, their more or less attaching "look" to give out. They had in short those painted eyes for the particular purpose of following their friend as he moved; and one of the things he actually found himself most doing was to circulate in their presence just to see for his amusement how far they would in this fashion go. They all had somehow the art of going further than he had ever perceived such a company--on the walls of a museum for instance--to coincide in going. His amusements, it will be noted, were for a rainy hour simple enough, and a protected observer of some of his proceedings would doubtless have pronounced them pointless to the verge of puerility. This, however, would result partly from the difficulty of his making a lucid plea for what all the while took place within him. It was a ferment deep enough--even while he might superficially have appeared but to be asking the flat framed images what _they_ thought of the question of his admitting Mrs. Midmore. He read into them as he lingered before them the knowledge of her being of their company; they had had on occasion, it would seem, to live with her, they had witnessed her ways and could give him the answer he watched and waited for. Nothing could have been more amusing, if, always, he was amused--than his impression at once that they really gave it and that he yet quite as really couldn't make it out. Portraits of the dead are at best ironic things, but, unknown and unnamed as were these victims of fate, none had ever so affected him as after all reacting upon it. This general innuendo, as he felt himself take it from them, was quite out of scale with their general obscurity. It represented none the less for his question neither a yea nor a nay; though it might have made one or the other if he could only have told which. It was thus their character, excepting only one, that they defied interpretation, and the character of the exception scarce bettered the case.