come home yet.

"Oh," said the young man, hesitating on the outer step.

"I guess you better come in," said the girl, "I'll go and see when
they're expecting him."

Corey was in the mood to be swayed by any chance. He obeyed the
suggestion of the second-girl's patronising friendliness, and let her
shut him into the drawing-room, while she went upstairs to announce him
to Penelope. "Did you tell him father wasn't at home?"

"Yes. He seemed so kind of disappointed, I told him to come in, and I'd
see when he WOULD be in," said the girl, with the human interest which
sometimes replaces in the American domestic the servile deference of
other countries.

A gleam of amusement passed over Penelope's face, as she glanced at
herself in the glass. "Well," she cried finally, dropping from her
shoulders the light shawl in which she had been huddled over a book
when Corey rang, "I will go down."

"All right," said the girl, and Penelope began hastily to amend the
disarray of her hair, which she tumbled into a mass on the top of her
little head, setting off the pale dark of her complexion with a flash
of crimson ribbon at her throat. She moved across the carpet once or
twice with the quaint grace that belonged to her small figure, made a
dissatisfied grimace at it in the glass, caught a handkerchief out of a
drawer and slid it into her pocket, and then descended to Corey.

The Lapham drawing-room in Nankeen Square was in the parti-coloured
paint which the Colonel had hoped to repeat in his new house: the trim
of the doors and windows was in light green and the panels in salmon;
the walls were a plain tint of French grey paper, divided by gilt
mouldings into broad panels with a wide stripe of red velvet paper
running up the corners; the chandelier was of massive imitation bronze;
the mirror over the mantel rested on a fringed mantel-cover of green
reps, and heavy curtains of that stuff hung from gilt lambrequin frames
at the window; the carpet was of a small pattern in crude green, which,
at the time Mrs. Lapham bought it, covered half the new floors in
Boston. In the panelled spaces on the walls were some stone-coloured
landscapes, representing the mountains and canyons of the West, which
the Colonel and his wife had visited on one of the early official
railroad excursions. In front of the long windows looking into the
Square were statues, kneeling figures which turned their backs upon the
company within-doors, and repre