The maid had announced to Mrs. Emery, finishing an unusually careful morning toilet, that Miss Burgess, society reporter of the Endbury _Chronicle_, was below. Before the mistress of the house could finish adjusting her well-matched gray pompadour, a second arrival was heralded, "The gentleman from the greenhouse, to see about Miss Lydia's party decorations." And as the handsome matron came down the stairs a third comer was introduced into the hall--Mme. Boyle herself, the best dressmaker in town, who had come in person to see about the refitting of the debutante's Paris dresses, the debutante having found the change back to the climate of Endbury so trying that her figure had grown quite noticeably thinner. "It was the one thing necessary to make Maddemwaselle's tournoor exactly perfect," Mme. Boyle told Mrs. Emery. Out of a sense of what was due her loyal Endbury customers, Mme. Boyle assumed a guileless coloring of Frenchiness, which was evidently a symbol, and no more intended for a pretense of reality than the honestly false brown front that surmounted her competent, kindly Celtic face. Mrs. Emery stopped a moment by the newel-post to direct Madame to Lydia's room and to offer up a devout thanksgiving to the kindly Providence that constantly smoothed the path before her. "Oh, Madame, just think if it had been a season when hips were in style!" As she continued her progress to what she was beginning to contemplate calling her drawing-room, she glowed with a sense of well-being which buoyed her up like wings. In common with many other estimable people, she could not but value more highly what she had had to struggle to retain, and the exciting vicissitudes of the last fortnight had left her with a sweet taste of victory in her mouth.