self,
and with the exalted and far away look which she wore when put out.

Phyl's room lay on the first landing, a bright and cheerful room papered
with a rather cheap flower and sprig patterned paper, spring-like for all
its cheapness, and just the background for children's heads when they wake
up on a bright morning.

A bowl of flowers stood on the dressing-table, and the open window shewed
across the verandah a bit of the garden, where the cherokee roses were
blooming.

"This is your room," said Miss Pinckney. "It's one of the brightest in the
house, and I hope you'll like it-- Listen!"

Through the open window came the chime of church-bells.

"It's the chimes of St. Michael's. You'll never want a clock here, the
bells ring every quarter, just as they've rung for the last hundred years;
they're the first thing I remember, and maybe they'll be the last. Well,
come on and I'll show you some more of the house, if you're not tired and
don't want to rest."

She led the way from the room and along the corridor, opening doors and
shewing rooms, and then up a back stairs to the top floor beneath the
attics.

The house seemed to grow in age as they ascended. Not a door in Vernons
was exactly true in line; the old house settling itself down quietly
through the years and assisted perhaps by the great earthquake, though
that had left it practically unharmed, shewed that deviation from the
right line in cornice and wainscoting and door space, which is the hall
mark left on architecture by genius or age. The builders of the Parthenon
knew this, the builders of Vernons did not-- Age supplied their defects.

Up here the flooring of the passages and rooms frankly sagged in places,
and the beams bellied downwards ever so little and the ceilings bowed.

"I've seen all these bed-rooms filled in the old days," said Miss
Pinckney. "We had wounded soldiers here in the war. What Vernons hasn't
seen of American history isn't worth telling--much. Here's the nursery."

She opened a door with bottle-glass panels, real old bottle-glass worth
its weight in minted silver, and shewed Phyl into a room.

"This is the nursery," said she.

It was a large room with two windows, and the windows were barred to keep
small people from tumbling into the garden. The place had the air of
silence and secrecy that haunts rooms long closed and deserted. An
old-fashioned paper shewing birds of Paradise covered the walls. A paper
so old that Miss Pinc