nton, I beg your pardon," suddenly called out the
ex-Anglican parson from the foot of the table, and despatching a servant
with a plate to the little widow. "I quite forgot your predilection."

"But somebody else may like the _inner consciousness_ too," returned
she, transferring to her own plate the fowl's gizzard sent. "You make
me feel like a terrible old French aunt of mine--a _gourmande_ who
spent two or three hours every day in consultation with her cook, a
man, concerning her for the most part solitary dinner, and who was at
the last found dead with her cook-book lying open on her knee! My
oldest brother, when a little fellow, dined with her one day. In his
helping of fowl was included the inner consciousness. Childlike, he put
this tid-bit carefully aside as a delicious last morsel. But the old
lady eyed his plate with great discontent, growing every moment more
grim. Finally she could bear it no longer, and, poising her fork, she
dexterously harpooned the _bonne-bouche_, and triumphantly transferred
it to her own plate, remarking to the dreadfully disappointed child, 'I
see, my nephew, that you don't love this little portion. Now _I_ do, so
it is best I should have it.' We none of us could tolerate this aunt,
but my brother's feeling toward her ever after was really venomous in
its spitefulness."

"That reminds me," said the Scotchman, "that I saw a photograph of
Dixblanc to-day, and was astonished to find her not at all an
evil-looking person. I quite believe now that she murdered her mistress
in a fit of passion, as she says, and not at all for robbery. And there
must have been awful provocation. Fancy living with a disreputable,
avaricious, nagging old Frenchwoman!"

"But how worse than with an old Englishwoman of like characteristics?"
asked somebody.

"Oh, because the _Francaise_ is more _fine_, exasperating, and utterly
unrestrained by terrors of Mrs. Grundy and the _decent_," replied the
ex-Anglican, ex-things-in-general truth-seeker.

You will easily imagine that the talk, as it ran from one thing to
another, was now and then upon topics of which I haven't the faintest
gleam of knowledge--the doctrines of Swedenborg, the philosophizings of
Spinoza and Vaurenargues. (Ronayne as usual spells the hard names for
me, but you, as a wise and much-reading damsel, will know who was meant
and all about it.)

After the ladies had returned to the drawing-room (for even in this New
Light house the stupid fash