Fanchon sat on the old lounge and dashed hot tears from her eyes. She pictured herself sitting at the luncheon-table with the family. She could see them! Mr. Carter and William would not be at home; but there would be Leigh, making moon eyes, a sentimental boy, and Emily with her white eyelashes and her honest, snub-nosed face, and Mrs. Carter, her fair hair fading in ugly streaks, and her absence of eyebrows. Daniel, too, his dark, handsome head bent and his eyes indifferent--he had never liked her! Even Miranda, moving around cumbersomely with the dishes, would show the whites of her eyes when she looked at her, as if she was watching something strange and outlandish. “I might be a Fiji Islander, from the way they look at me!” Fanchon sobbed angrily, staring about the old room with its familiar, guttered armchairs, its littered library-table--where Mr. Carter’s pipe lay beside his accustomed place--and at the dull, ancestral Carter over the mantelpiece. The portrait filled the latest Carter bride with a kind of fury. She rose from the lounge and went and stared at it. “Ugly old thing!” she cried angrily. “You’d hate me, if you could!” She felt a sudden sensation of suffocation. The place was too small for her; she couldn’t breathe in it. She went to the window and leaned out, staring blankly at the peaceful scene. The Carter house was well on the outskirts of the town, and she could glimpse a distant meadow where a spotted cow moved placidly. A few red chickens crossed her vision, picking in the grass. A colored maid in the next house was pinning some clothes on the line. Down the quiet street an ice-cart trundled its sober, dripping way. It was quiet again when the sound of wheels receded; then suddenly a rooster crowed. He crowed tremendously in a fine, deep bass. “_Mon Dieu!_” cried Fanchon. She drew back from the intolerable prospect, and heard Miranda setting the table for luncheon. The faint jingle of glasses and the occasional rattle of china warned her. The domestic meal was approaching with its unfailing regularity. She could not bear it. She ran out of the room, and had one foot already on the lowest step of the stairs, when the door opened and Leigh came in. “Fanchon!” he cried eagerly, his boyish face flushing to the hair. An imp of perversity stopped her. She stood balanced, one hand on the banisters, looking back over her shoulder. There was at least one Carter she could manage, and she knew it. Those fawn eyes softened and glowed. “Leigh!” she responded softly. “_Mon brave garçon!_” He put his books down and came toward her with shining eyes. “Oh, Fanchon, what mites of feet you’ve got!” he exclaimed, looking at the foot that she was displaying on the step. “I never saw a foot as small as that.” She smiled. “You think so, _chéri_?”