From a long and varied association with men and manners Mrs. Payne had gathered a certain halo of experience, as of one who had ripened from mere acquaintance into a degree of positive intimacy with the world. She had seen it up and down from all sides, had turned it critically about for her half-humorous, half-sentimental inspection, and the frank cynicism which now flavoured her candid criticism of life only added the spice of personality to her original distinction of adventure. As the wife of an Ambassador to France in the time of the gay Eugénie, and again as one of the diplomatic circle in Cairo and in Constantinople, she had stored her mind with precious anecdotes much as a squirrel stores a hollow in his tree with nuts. Life had taught her that the one infallible method for impressing your generation is to impress it by a difference, and, beginning as a variation from type, she had ended by commanding attention as a preserved specimen of an extinct species. Long, wiry, animated, and habitually perturbed, she moved in a continual flutter of speech--a creature to be reckoned with from the little, flat, round curls upon her temples, which looked as if each separate hair was held in place by a particular wire, to the sweep of her black velvet train, which surged at an exaggerated length behind her feet. Her face was like an old and tattered comic mask which, though it has been flung aside as no longer provocative of pleasant mirth, still carries upon its cheeks and eyebrows the smears of the rouge pot and the pencil. "My dear Angela," she now asked in her excited tones, "have you really been walking about again? I lay awake all night fearing that you had over-taxed your strength yesterday. Mrs. Francis Barnes--you never knew her of course, but she was a distant cousin of Horace's--died quite suddenly, without an instant's warning, after having walked rapidly twice up and down the room. Since then I have always looked upon movement as a very dangerous thing." "Well, I could hardly die suddenly under any circumstances," returned Angela, indifferently. "You've been watching by my death-bed for forty years." "Oh, dear sister," pleaded Mrs. Bleeker, whose heart, was as soft as her bosom. "It does sound as if you thought we really wanted your things," commented Mrs. Payne, opening and shutting her painted fan. "Of course--if you were to die we should be too heart-broken to care what you left--but, since we are on the subject, I've always meant to ask you to leave me the shawl of old rose-point which belonged to mother." "Rosa, how can you?" remonstrated Mrs. Bleeker, "I am sure I hope Angela will outlive me many years, but if she doesn't I want everything she has to go to Laura."