ly, but there
was no sound of voices. Up-stairs, all was still; the children were
in crib and cradle, and Asenath was shaking and folding little
garments,--shapes out of which the busy spirits had slidden.

He came up behind her, where she stood before the fire.

"All well, little mother?" he questioned. "Or tired to death? There
are festive odors in the house. Has anybody repented and come back
again?"

"Not a bit of it!" Sin exclaimed triumphantly, turning round and
facing him, all rosy with the loving romp she had been having just a
little while before with her babies. "Frank! I've got a pair of
Abraham's angels down-stairs! Or Mrs. Abraham's,--if she ever had
any. I don't remember that they used to send them to women much, now
I think of it, after Eve demeaned herself to entertain the old
serpent. Ah! the _babies_ came instead; that was it! Well; there is
a couple in the kitchen now, at any rate; and they're toasting and
stewing in the most E--_lys_ian manner! That's what you smell."

"Angels? Babies? What terrible ambiguity! What, or who, is stewing,
if you please, dear?"

"Muffins. No! oysters. There! you sha'n't know anything about it
till you go down to tea. But the millennium's come, and it's begun
in our house."

"I knew that, six years ago," said Frank Scherman. "There are
exactly nine hundred and ninety-four left of it. I can wait till
tea-time with the patience of the saints."

CHAPTER XXVIII.

"LIVING IN."

Desire Ledwith went over to Leicester Place with Bel Bree, when she
returned there for the first needful sorting and packing and
removing. Bel could not go alone, to risk any meeting; to put
herself, voluntarily and unprotected in the way again. Miss Ledwith
took a carriage and called for her. In that manner they could bring
away nearly all. What remained could be sent for.

Miss Smalley possessed some movables of her own, though the
furnishings in her room had been mostly Mrs. Pimminy's. There were
some things of her aunt's that Bel would like, and which she had
asked leave to bring to Mrs. Scherman's.

The light, round table, with its old fashioned slender legs and claw
feet, its red cloth, and the books and little ornaments, Bel wanted
in her sleeping-room. "Because they were Aunt Blin's," she said,
"and nothing else would seem so pleasant. She should like to take
them with her wherever she went."

The two trunks--hers and Katy's--(Bel had Aunt Blin's great
flat-topped one n