dear, it's pouring with rain. Do you think you could be happy
as our guest to-day, or must I send you home in the carriage?"
questioned Madame Giche.

They were in what was called the tapestried chamber, a room lined with
needlework, done by dead fingers of long ago: those of some of the
ladies whose portraits Inna was to see by-and-by in the grand staircase,
and the gallery running round the hall.

"I should like--what would you like me to do, ma'am?" faltered Inna.

"We should much like you to stay, dear," returned Madame Giche, still
holding her hand.

"Then, thank you, I should like to stay."

So it was decided, and Olive and Sybil, the twin sisters, drew away
their guest to look at pretty foreign ornaments, in profusion all about
the room.

"All grand-auntie's own," as they told her, "which we brought from
abroad. You see, this isn't our own home, but grand-auntie took it on
lease from a gentleman we met abroad. Grand-auntie has lived abroad for
years and years, ever since her heart was broken." So they chatted, and
enlightened Inna.

This was in the afternoon, after they had lunched with Madame Giche in
the tapestried room, and had wandered away up into the picture-gallery,
to look at some of the pictures.

"There, that is grand-auntie; isn't it like? That was done abroad," said
Sybil, who was the talker. Olive was sedate and somewhat silent.

There was no mistaking the sweet aged face peering down at them from the
canvas, and Inna said so.

"And that is grand-auntie's son--he who broke her heart, you know. He
disappointed her, went abroad, married, and died," whispered the child.
"Ah! whisper it," so she expressed it, "because it is all so sad.
Grand-auntie was never reconciled to him, you see, and so can never make
it up in this world. He had a wife and a little boy, and grand-auntie
has searched Europe over, she says, and can't find them."

A dark, handsome, wilful young face had Madame Giche's son, as seen in
his portrait--a young man just on the threshold of manhood. Inna stood
to gaze at it, wondering what it was stirring the depths of her
sensitive little heart, and filling it with a lingering pain.

"Grand-auntie says these two pictures have no right here, and calls them
alien pictures among aliens, because the house isn't ours and the
pictures don't rightly belong here; but she took her son's portrait with
her in all her travels, and her own was done abroad, and of course she
brought them h