conventionalize these original outlines; and the hand that
rested stiffly on the back of her chair, albeit neither over-white nor
well kept, looked as if it had never held anything but a lyre, a rose,
or a good book. Even the few sprays of wild jessamine which she had
placed in the coils of her waving hair, although a local fashion, became
her as a special ornament.

The two girls kept their constrained and artificially elaborated
attitude for a few moments, accompanied by the murmur of voices in the
kitchen, the monotonous drip of the eaves before the window, and the
far-off sough of the wind. Then Phemie suddenly broke into a constrained
giggle, which she however quickly smothered as she had the accordion,
and with the same look of mischievous distress.

"I'm astonished at you, Phemie," said Clementina in a deep contralto
voice, which seemed even deeper from its restraint. "You don't seem to
have any sense. Anybody'd think you never had seen a stranger before."

"Saw him before you did," retorted Phemie pertly. But here a pushing
of chairs and shuffling of feet in the kitchen checked her. Clementina
fixed an abstracted gaze on the ceiling; Phemie regarded a leaf on
the window sill with photographic rigidity as the door opened to the
strangers and her father.

The look of undisguised satisfaction which lit the young men's faces
relieved Mr. Harkutt's awkward introduction of any embarrassment, and
almost before Phemie was fully aware of it, she found herself talking
rapidly and in a high key with Mr. Lawrence Grant, the surveyor, while
her sister was equally, although more sedately, occupied with Mr.
Stephen Rice, his assistant. But the enthusiasm of the strangers, and
the desire to please and be pleased was so genuine and contagious that
presently the accordion was brought into requisition, and Mr. Grant
exhibited a surprising faculty of accompaniment to Mr. Rice's tenor, in
which both the girls joined.

Then a game of cards with partners followed, into which the rival
parties introduced such delightful and shameless obviousness of
cheating, and displayed such fascinating and exaggerated partisanship
that the game resolved itself into a hilarious melee, to which peace was
restored only by an exhibition of tricks of legerdemain with the
cards by the young surveyor. All of which Mr. Harkutt supervised
patronizingly, with occasional fits of abstraction, from his
rocking-chair; and later Mrs. Harkutt from her kitchen