ould be. Anna would have been
considerably disappointed, and perhaps even moved to tears, if she had
known that the room she thought so pretty struck the baroness, whose
taste in furniture had not advanced beyond an appreciation for the dark
and heavy hangings and walnut-wood tables of her more prosperous years,
merely as odd. Odd, and very expensive. Where did the money come from
for this reckless furnishing with stuffs and colours that were bound to
show each stain? Her eye wandered along the shelves above the
writing-table--hers was the Heine and Maeterlinck room--and she wondered
what all the books were there for. She did not touch them as she had
touched everything else, for except an occasional novel, and, more
regularly, a journal beloved of German woman called the _Gartenlaube_,
she never read.

On the writing-table lay a blotter, a pretty, embroidered thing that
said as plainly as blotter could say that it had been chosen with
immense care; and opening it she found notepaper and envelopes stamped
with the Kleinwalde address and her own monogram. This was Anna's little
special gift, a childish addition, the making of which had given her an
absurd amount of pleasure. The happy idea, as she called it, had come to
her one night when she lay awake thinking about her new friends and
going through the familiar process of discovering their tastes by
imagining herself in their place. "_Sonderbar_," was the baroness's
comment; and she decided that the best thing she could do would be to
ring the bell and endeavour to obtain private information about Miss
Estcourt by means of a prolonged cross-examination of the housemaid.

She rang it, and then sat very straight and still on the sofa with her
hands folded in her lap, and waited. Her soul was full of doubts. Who
was this Miss, and where were the proofs that she was, as she had
pretended, of good birth? That she was not so very pious was evident;
for if she had been, some remark of a religious nature would inevitably
have been forthcoming when she first welcomed them to her house. No such
word, not the least approach to any such word, had been audible. There
had not even been an allusion, a sigh, or an upward glance. Yet the
pastor who had opened the correspondence had filled many pages with
expatiations on her zeal after righteousness. And then she was so young.
The baroness had expected to see an elderly person, or at least a person
of the age of everybody else, which w