ought up; she herself was a gracious widow
of large means recovering from a great sorrow; one who had given up the
delights of foreign courts to spend some time among her dear people who
had loved her as a child. Here for a time would she bring up and
educate her daughter.

"To be once more at home, and in dear old Warehold, too!" she had said
with upraised Madonna-like eyes and clasped hands to a group of women
who were hanging on every word that dropped from her pretty lips. "Do
you know what that is to me? There is hardly a day I have not longed
for it. Pray, forgive me if I do not come to see you as often as I
would, but I really hate to be an hour outside of the four walls of my
precious home."

CHAPTER XV

A PACKAGE OF LETTERS

Under the influence of the new arrival it was not at all strange that
many changes were wrought in the domestic life at Cobden Manor.

My lady was a sensuous creature, loving color and flowers and the
dainty appointments of life as much in the surroundings of her home as
in the adornment of her person, and it was not many weeks before the
old-fashioned sitting-room had been transformed into a French boudoir.
In this metamorphosis she had used but few pieces of new furniture--one
or two, perhaps, that she had picked up in the village, as well as some
bits of mahogany and brass that she loved--but had depended almost
entirely upon the rearrangement of the heirlooms of the family. With
the boudoir idea in view, she had pulled the old tables out from the
walls, drawn the big sofa up to the fire, spread a rug--one of her
own--before the mantel, hung new curtains at the windows and ruffled
their edges with lace, banked the sills with geraniums and begonias,
tilted a print or two beside the clock, scattered a few books and
magazines over the centre-table, on which she had placed a big,
generous lamp, under whose umbrella shade she could see to read as she
sat in her grandmother's rocking-chair--in fact, had, with that taste
inherent in some women--touched with a knowing hand the dead things
about her and made them live and mean something;--her talisman being an
unerring sense of what contributed to personal comfort. Heretofore
Doctor John had been compelled to drag a chair halfway across the room
in order to sit and chat with Jane, or had been obliged to share her
seat on the sofa, too far from the hearth on cold days to be
comfortable. Now he could either stand on the hearth-rug and