then they drove away, and Penelope shut the door, and went upstairs
with her lips firmly shutting in a sob.

XIV.

THE Coreys were one of the few old families who lingered in Bellingham
Place, the handsome, quiet old street which the sympathetic observer
must grieve to see abandoned to boarding-houses. The dwellings are
stately and tall, and the whole place wears an air of aristocratic
seclusion, which Mrs. Corey's father might well have thought assured
when he left her his house there at his death. It is one of two
evidently designed by the same architect who built some houses in a
characteristic taste on Beacon Street opposite the Common. It has a
wooden portico, with slender fluted columns, which have always been
painted white, and which, with the delicate mouldings of the cornice,
form the sole and sufficient decoration of the street front; nothing
could be simpler, and nothing could be better. Within, the architect
has again indulged his preference for the classic; the roof of the
vestibule, wide and low, rests on marble columns, slim and fluted like
the wooden columns without, and an ample staircase climbs in a
graceful, easy curve from the tesselated pavement. Some carved
Venetian scrigni stretched along the wall; a rug lay at the foot of the
stairs; but otherwise the simple adequacy of the architectural
intention had been respected, and the place looked bare to the eyes of
the Laphams when they entered. The Coreys had once kept a man, but
when young Corey began his retrenchments the man had yielded to the
neat maid who showed the Colonel into the reception-room and asked the
ladies to walk up two flights.

He had his charges from Irene not to enter the drawing-room without her
mother, and he spent five minutes in getting on his gloves, for he had
desperately resolved to wear them at last. When he had them on, and
let his large fists hang down on either side, they looked, in the
saffron tint which the shop-girl said his gloves should be of, like
canvased hams. He perspired with doubt as he climbed the stairs, and
while he waited on the landing for Mrs. Lapham and Irene to come down
from above before going into the drawing-room, he stood staring at his
hands, now open and now shut, and breathing hard. He heard quiet
talking beyond the portiere within, and presently Tom Corey came out.

"Ah, Colonel Lapham! Very glad to see you."

Lapham shook hands with him and gasped, "Waiting for Mis' Lapham