s Higgins's luncheon."

"Yes; but it was an early luncheon," the grandmother said,
discontentedly. "She was playing squash, or tennis, or something!
Regina----"

"Yes, Madam?"

But Mrs. Melrose was musing again.

"Regina, I am expecting a caller at four o'clock, a Mrs. Sheridan.
Please see that she is shown up at once. I want to see her here. And
please----"

A pause. Regina waited.

"That's all!" her mistress announced, suddenly.

Alone again, the old lady stirred her tea, ruminated for a few moments
with narrowed eyes fixed on space, recalled herself to her surroundings,
and finished her cup.

Her room was large, filled with chairs and tables, lamps and cushions,
silver trays and lacquer boxes, vases and jars and bowls, gift books
and current magazines. There was not an unbroken inch of surface
anywhere, the walls were closely set with pictures of all sorts. Along
the old-fashioned mantel, a scalloped, narrow shelf of marble, was a
crowding line of photographs in silver frames, and there were other
framed photographs all about the room. There were the young mothers of
the late eighties, seated to best display their bustles and their French
twists, with heavy-headed infants in their tightly cased arms, and there
were children's pictures, babes in shells, in swings, or leaning on
gates. There were three Annies: one in ringlets, plaid silk, and
tasselled boots, at eight; one magnificent in drawing-room plumes; and a
recent one, a cloudy study of the severely superb mother, with a
sleek-headed, wide-collared boy on each side of her. There was a
photograph of the son Theodore, handsome, sullen, dressed in the fashion
of the opening century, and there was more than one of Theodore's
daughter, the last of the Melroses. Leslie had been a wide-eyed, sturdy
little girl who carried a perpetually surprised, even a babyish
expression into her teens, but her last pictures showed the debutante,
the piquant and charming eighteen-year-old, whose knowingly tipped hat
and high fur collar left only a glimpse of pretty and pouting face
between.

Leslie came in upon her grandmother at about three o'clock. She was
genuinely tired, after an athletic morning at the club, a luncheon amid
a group of chattering intimates, and a walk with the young man whose
attentions to her were thrilling not only her grandmother and aunts, but
the cool-blooded little Leslie herself. Acton Liggett was Christopher's
only brother, only relative indee