erhaps with the idea of relieving the tension of their mood
that Evelina, the following Sunday, suggested inviting Miss Mellins to
supper. The Bunner sisters were not in a position to be lavish of the
humblest hospitality, but two or three times in the year they shared
their evening meal with a friend; and Miss Mellins, still flushed with
the importance of her "turn," seemed the most interesting guest they
could invite.

As the three women seated themselves at the supper-table, embellished by
the unwonted addition of pound cake and sweet pickles, the dress-maker's
sharp swarthy person stood out vividly between the neutral-tinted
sisters. Miss Mellins was a small woman with a glossy yellow face and
a frizz of black hair bristling with imitation tortoise-shell pins. Her
sleeves had a fashionable cut, and half a dozen metal bangles rattled
on her wrists. Her voice rattled like her bangles as she poured forth a
stream of anecdote and ejaculation; and her round black eyes jumped with
acrobatic velocity from one face to another. Miss Mellins was always
having or hearing of amazing adventures. She had surprised a burglar in
her room at midnight (though how he got there, what he robbed her
of, and by what means he escaped had never been quite clear to her
auditors); she had been warned by anonymous letters that her grocer (a
rejected suitor) was putting poison in her tea; she had a customer who
was shadowed by detectives, and another (a very wealthy lady) who
had been arrested in a department store for kleptomania; she had been
present at a spiritualist seance where an old gentleman had died in a
fit on seeing a materialization of his mother-in-law; she had escaped
from two fires in her night-gown, and at the funeral of her first cousin
the horses attached to the hearse had run away and smashed the coffin,
precipitating her relative into an open man-hole before the eyes of his
distracted family.

A sceptical observer might have explained Miss Mellins's proneness to
adventure by the fact that she derived her chief mental nourishment from
the Police Gazette and the Fireside Weekly; but her lot was cast in a
circle where such insinuations were not likely to be heard, and where
the title-role in blood-curdling drama had long been her recognized
right.

"Yes," she was now saying, her emphatic eyes on Ann Eliza, "you may not
believe it, Miss Bunner, and I don't know's I should myself if anybody
else was to tell me, but over a year