The scene was a drawing-room in a country house looking out upon what was at this time of year the rather damp and depressing prospect of a park, with some fine trees and a great breadth of very green, very mossy, very wet grass. It was only October, though the end of the month; and in the middle of the day, in the sunshine, the trees, in all their varied colors, were a fine sight, cheerful and almost exhilarating, beguiling the eye; but now the sun was gone, the leaves were falling in little showers whenever the faintest breath of air arose, and where the green turf was not veiled by their many colored remnants, it was green with that emerald hue which means only wet; one knew as one gazed across it that one’s foot would sink in the spongy surface, and wet, wet would be the boot, the skirt which touched it; the men in their knickerbockers, or those carefully turned up trousers--which we hear are the fashion in the dryest streets of Paris and New York--suffered comparatively little. The brushwood was all wet, with blobs of moisture on the long brambles and drooping leaves. The park was considered a beautiful park, though not a very large one, but it was melancholy itself to look out for hours together upon that green expanse in such an evening. It was not a bad evening either. There was no rain; the clouds hung low, but as yet had given forth no shower. The air was damp but yet brisk. There was a faint yellow glimmer of what might have been sunset in the sky. The windows in the Wradisley drawing-rooms were large; one of them, a vast, shallow bow, which seemed to admit the outside into the interior, rather than to enlighten the interior with the view of what was outside. Mrs. Wradisley sat within reach of, but not too near, a large, very red fire--a fire which was like the turf outside, the growth of generations, or at least had not at all the air of having been lighted to-day or any recent day. It did not flame, but glowed steadily, adding something to the color of the room, but not much to the light. Later in the season, when larger parties assembled, there was tea in the hall for the sportsmen and the ladies who waited for them; but Mrs. Wradisley thought the hall draughty, and much preferred the drawing-room, which was over-furnished after the present mode of drawing-rooms, but at least warm, and free from draughts. She was working--knitting with white pins, or else making mysterious chains and bridges in white wool with a crochet-hook, her eyes being supposed to be not very strong, and this kind of industry the best adapted for them. As to what Lucy was doing, that defies description. She was doing everything and nothing. She had something of a modern young lady’s contempt for every kind of needlework, and, then, along with that, a great admiration for it as something still more superior than the superiority of idleness. A needle is one of the things that has this double effect. It is the scorn of a