anatorium for six months."

"I hear," said Mrs. Flint, "that Humphrey Crewe is quite epris."

"Poor dear Humphrey!" exclaimed Mrs. Pomfret, "he can think of nothing
else but politics."

But we are not to take up again, as yet, the deeds of the crafty Ulysses.
In order to relate an important conversation between Mrs. Pomfret and the
Rose of Sharon, we have gone back a week in this history, and have left
Victoria--absorbed in her thoughts--driving over a wood road of many
puddles that led to the Four Corners, near Avalon. The road climbed the
song-laden valley of a brook, redolent now with scents of which the rain
had robbed the fern, but at length Victoria reached an upland where the
young corn was springing from the, black furrows that followed the
contours of the hillsides, where the big-eyed cattle lay under the heavy
maples and oaks or gazed at her across the fences.

Victoria drew up in front of an unpainted farm-house straggling beside
the road, a farm-house which began with the dignity of fluted pilasters
and ended in a tumble-down open shed filled with a rusty sleigh and a
hundred nondescript articles--some of which seemed to be moving. Intently
studying this phenomenon from her runabout, she finally discovered that
the moving objects were children; one of whom, a little girl, came out
and stared at her.

"How do you do, Mary?" said Victoria. "Isn't your name Mary?"

The child nodded.

"I remember you," she said; "you're the rich lady, mother met at the
party, that got father a job."

Victoria smiled. And such was the potency of the smile that the child
joined in it.

"Where's brother?" asked Victoria. "He must be quite grown up since we
gave him lemonade."

Mary pointed to the woodshed.

"O dear!" exclaimed Victoria, leaping out of the runabout and hitching
her horse, "aren't you afraid some of those sharp iron things will fall
on him?" She herself rescued brother from what seemed untimely and
certain death, and set him down in safety in the middle of the grass
plot. He looked up at her with the air of one whose dignity has been
irretrievably injured, and she laughed as she reached down and pulled his
nose. Then his face, too, became wreathed in smiles.

"Mary, how old are you?"

"Seven, ma'am."

"And I'm five," Mary's sister chimed in.

"I want you to promise me," said Victoria, "that you won't let brother
play in that shed. And the very next time I come I'll bring you both the
nicest thing