ly faded if you
did not keep the window-shades down, she remembered--and she wanted back
her white thick comfortable carpet which hid the floor completely, so
that everywhere you trod upon the buxomest of stalwart yellow roses,
each bunch of which was lavishly tied with wind-blown ribbons.

Then, too, her cherished spinning-wheel, at least two hundred and fifty
years old, which had looked so pretty after she had gilded it and added
a knot of pink sarsenet, was departed; and gone as well was the
mirror-topped table, with its array of china swan and frogs and
water-lilies artistically grouped about its speckless surface. Even her
prized engraving of "Michael Angelo Buonarotti"--contentedly regarding
his just finished Moses, while a pope tiptoed into the room through a
side-door--had been removed, with all its splendors of red-plush and
intricate gilt-framing.

Just here and there, in fine, like a familiar face in a crowd, she could
discover some one of her more sedately-colored "parlor ornaments"; and
the whole history of it--its donor or else its price, the gestures of
the shopman, even what sort of weather it was when she and Rudolph found
"exactly what I've been looking for" in the shop-window, and the
Stapyltonian, haggling over the price with which Patricia had
bargained--such unimportant details as these now vividly awakened in
recollection.... In fine, this room was not her parlor at all, and in it
Patricia was lonely.... Yes, yes, she would be nowadays, the colonel
reflected, for he himself had never been in thorough sympathy with all
the changes made by Roger's self-assured young wife.

Thus it was with the first floor of the house, through which Patricia
strayed with uniform discomfort. This place was home no longer.

Thus it was with the first floor of the house. Everywhere the equipments
were strange, or at best arranged not quite as Patricia would have
placed them. Yet they had not any look of being recently purchased. Even
that hideous stair-carpet was a little worn, she noted, as noiselessly
she mounted to the second story.

The house was perfectly quiet, save for a tiny shrill continuance of
melody that somehow seemed only to pierce the silence, not to dispel it.
Rudolph--of all things!--had in her absence acquired a canary. And
everybody knew what an interminable nuisance a canary was.

She entered the front room. It had been her bedroom ever since her
marriage. She remembered this as with a gush of