t her seat beside Fanny, and was moving with a listless
content about the parlor.

"I wonder you ask, Richard, when you know she's only come for the night,
and has nothing with her but a few cuffs and collars! I certainly never
heard of anything so absurd before!"

The absurdity of the idea then seemed to cast its charm upon her, for,
after a silence, "I could lend her some things," she said musingly. "But
don't speak of it to-night, please. It's too ridiculous. Kitty!" she
called out, and, as the young lady drew near, she continued, "How would
you like to go to Quebec, with us?"

"O Fanny!" cried Kitty, with rapture; and then, with dismay, "How can
I?"

"Why, very well, I think. You've got this dress, and your
travelling-suit; and I can lend you whatever you want. Come!" she added
joyously, "let's go up to your room, and talk it over!"

The two ladies vanished upon this impulse, and the gentleman followed.
To their own relief the guiltless eaves-droppers, who found no moment
favorable for revealing themselves after the comedy began, issued from
their retiracy.

"What a remarkable little lady!" said Basil, eagerly turning to Isabel
for sympathy in his enjoyment of her inconsequence.

"Yes, poor thing!" returned his wife; "it's no light matter to invite
a young lady to take a journey with you, and promise her all sorts of
gayety, and perhaps beaux and flirtations, and then find her on your
hands in a desolation like this. It's dreadful, I think."

Basil stared. "O, certainly," he said. "But what an amusingly illogical
little body!"

"I don't understand what you mean, Basil. It was the only thing that
she could do, to invite the young lady to go on with them. I wonder her
husband had the sense to think of it first. Of course she'll have to
lend her things."

"And you didn't observe anything peculiar in her way of reaching her
conclusions?"

"Peculiar? What do you mean?"

"Why, her blaming her husband for letting her have her own way about
the hotel; and her telling him not to mention his proposal to Kitty,
and then doing it herself, just--after she'd pronounced it absurd and
impossible." He spoke with heat at being forced to make what he thought
a needless explanation.

"O!" said Isabel, after a moment's reflection. "That! Did you think it
so very odd?"

Her husband looked at her with the gravity a man must feel when he
begins to perceive that he has married the whole mystifying world of
womankind in t