The scholastic duties were well over by noon, except perhaps for the scale-playing on the grand piano, and the "ladies" roamed at will about the house, or in the parterre if the weather were dry, or played at battledore and shuttlecock or graces in the long gallery enclosed with Venetian blinds. If it rained they were permitted to repair to the kitchen, where Aunt Chaney, a very tall, portly woman, with a stately gruffness, obviously spurious, accommodated them with bits of dough, to be moulded into ducks and pigs, and assigned them a small section of the stove whereon to bake these triumphs of the plastic art. Doll's dresses were here laundered, being washed in a small cedar noggin owned in common by the trio, and a miniature sad-iron, heated by special permission on Aunt Chaney's stove, was brought into requisition. Sometimes Aunt Chaney was in a softened mood, and fluted a ruffle on a wax baby's skirt, and told wonderful tales about Mrs. Gwynn's dresses in her girlhood, "flounced to the waist, and crimped to a charm." Thence the transition was easy to the details of her young mistress's social triumphs and celebrated beauty, with lovers in gangs, all sighing like furnaces and represented as rolling in riches and riding splendid and prancing horses, the final special zest of each story being the fruitless jealousy of the red-headed Miss Mildred Fisher, eating her heart out,--this to the immature imagination of the "ladies" literally resembled the chickens' hearts which were so daintily chopped to garnish the dish of fried pullets amidst the parsley. As the rain beat against the windows and the evening fell, the trio thought many a loitering-place less attractive than the chimney-nook behind the stove in Aunt Chaney's kitchen, regaled with her stories as she cooked, and now and then a spoonful of some dainty, administered with the curt command, "Open yer mouf, ladies!" Thus it was that the library was almost deserted when Colonel Ashley called more than once. Captain Baynell he found, and occasionally the judge also. He always selected the afternoons, and after a time he was wont to glance about with such a keen, predatory expression that the truth began to dawn vaguely on Captain Baynell. Vanity is so robust an endowment that it had been easy enough for the recipient of these visits to appropriate wholly the interest that prompted them. It struck Baynell with an indignant sense of impropriety when he began to remember Ashley's ardent desire to meet Mrs. Gwynn, his admiration of the glimpse of her beauty that had once been vouchsafed him, and to connect this with his manifestation of good comradeship and eager solicitude concerning his friend's health. Baynell was infinitely out of countenance for a moment.