--in this quiet
place?"

"You speak," said Acton, laughing, "as if it were a question of the poor
Baroness opening a wine-shop or a gaming-table."

"It would be too lovely!" Gertrude declared again, laying her hand on
the back of her father's chair.

"That she should open a gaming-table?" Charlotte asked, with great
gravity.

Gertrude looked at her a moment, and then, "Yes, Charlotte," she said,
simply.

"Gertrude is growing pert," Clifford Wentworth observed, with his
humorous young growl. "That comes of associating with foreigners."

Mr. Wentworth looked up at his daughter, who was standing beside him; he
drew her gently forward. "You must be careful," he said. "You must keep
watch. Indeed, we must all be careful. This is a great change; we are
to be exposed to peculiar influences. I don't say they are bad. I don't
judge them in advance. But they may perhaps make it necessary that we
should exercise a great deal of wisdom and self-control. It will be a
different tone."

Gertrude was silent a moment, in deference to her father's speech; then
she spoke in a manner that was not in the least an answer to it. "I want
to see how they will live. I am sure they will have different hours. She
will do all kinds of little things differently. When we go over there it
will be like going to Europe. She will have a boudoir. She will invite
us to dinner--very late. She will breakfast in her room."

Charlotte gazed at her sister again. Gertrude's imagination seemed to
her to be fairly running riot. She had always known that Gertrude had
a great deal of imagination--she had been very proud of it. But at the
same time she had always felt that it was a dangerous and irresponsible
faculty; and now, to her sense, for the moment, it seemed to threaten to
make her sister a strange person who should come in suddenly, as from a
journey, talking of the peculiar and possibly unpleasant things she had
observed. Charlotte's imagination took no journeys whatever; she
kept it, as it were, in her pocket, with the other furniture of this
receptacle--a thimble, a little box of peppermint, and a morsel of
court-plaster. "I don't believe she would have any dinner--or any
breakfast," said Miss Wentworth. "I don't believe she knows how to do
anything herself. I should have to get her ever so many servants, and
she would n't like them."

"She has a maid," said Gertrude; "a French maid. She mentioned her."

"I wonder if the maid has a little flu