close-fitting sleeves and the narrow waists of the period, and their
elaborately draped overskirts were looped on the left with graduated
bows of light blue ottoman ribbon. They wore no hats, and Virginia, who
was the shorter of the two, had fastened a Jacqueminot rose in the thick
dark braid which was wound in a wreath about her head. Above her arched
black eyebrows, which lent an expression of surprise and animation to
her vivid oval face, her hair was parted, after an earlier fashion,
under its plaited crown, and allowed to break in a mist of little curls
over her temples. Even in repose there was a joyousness in her look
which seemed less the effect of an inward gaiety of mind than of some
happy outward accident of form and colour. Her eyes, very far apart and
set in black lashes, were of a deep soft blue--the blue of wild
hyacinths after rain. By her eyes, and by an old-world charm of
personality which she exhaled like a perfume, it was easy to discern
that she embodied the feminine ideal of the ages. To look at her was to
think inevitably of love. For that end, obedient to the powers of Life,
the centuries had formed and coloured her, as they had formed and
coloured the wild rose with its whorl of delicate petals. The air of a
spoiled beauty which rested not ungracefully upon her was sweetened by
her expression of natural simplicity and goodness.

For an instant she stood listening in silence to the querulous pipes of
the bird and the earnest exhortations of the teacher on the joys of cage
life for both bird and lady. Then plucking the solitary early bud from
the microphylla rose-bush, she tossed it over the railing of the porch
on the large and placid bosom of Miss Priscilla.

"Do leave Dicky alone for a minute!" she called in a winning soprano
voice.

At the sound, Miss Priscilla dropped the bit of cake she held, and
turned to lean delightedly over the walk, while her face beamed like a
beneficent moon through the shining cloud of rose-leaves.

"Why, Jinny, I hadn't any idea that you and Susan were there!"

Her smile included Virginia's companion, a tall, rather heavy girl, with
intelligent grey eyes and fair hair cut in a straight fringe across her
forehead. She was the daughter of Cyrus Treadwell, the wealthiest and
therefore the most prominent citizen of the town, and she was also as
intellectual as the early eighties and the twenty-one thousand
inhabitants of Dinwiddie permitted a woman to be. Her frien