n of the promise of
flowers--a scent of earth and green leaves, of the leafless daphne
still a-bloom in the shrubbery, of hyacinths and daffodils and tulips
and primroses still sheathed in their buds and awaiting a warmer air.

But this promise of spring borne into the room by the wandering breeze
from the river, was nipped, as it were, by the frigid spirit of age
and formalism in its living occupants. Mrs. de Tracy, a lady of
seventy-five, sat at her writing-table. Her companion, Miss Smeardon,
a person of indeterminate age, nursed the lap-dog Rupert during such
time as her employer was too deeply engaged to fulfil that agreeable
duty. Mrs. de Tracy, as she wrote, was surrounded by countless
photographs of her family and her wide connection, most prominent
among them two--that of her husband, Admiral de Tracy, who had died
many years ago, and that of her grandson, his successor, whose
guardian she was, and whose minority she directed. Her eldest son, the
father of this boy, who had died on his ship off the coast of Africa;
his wife, dead too these many years; her other sons as well (she had
borne four); their wives and children--grown men, fashionable women,
beautiful children, fat babies: the likenesses of them all were around
her, standing amid china and flowers and bric-a-brac on the crowded
tables and what-nots of the not inharmonious and yet shabby Victorian
room. Mrs. de Tracy, it might at a glance be seen, was no innovator,
either in furniture, in dress, or probably in ideas. As she was
dressed now, in the severely simple black of a widow, so she had been
dressed when she first mourned Admiral de Tracy. The muslin ends of
her widow's cap fell upon her shoulders, and its border rested on the
hard lines of iron-grey hair which framed a face small, pale, aquiline
in character and decidedly austere in expression.

She took one from a docketed pile of letters and held it up under her
glasses, the sun suddenly striking a dazzle of blue and green from the
diamond rings on her small, withered hands. Then she read it aloud to
her companion in an even and chilly voice. She had read it before, in
the same way, at the same hour, several times. The letter, couched in
an epistolary style largely dependent upon underlining, appeared to
contain, nevertheless, some matter of moment. It was dated from Eaton
Square, in London, some weeks before, and signed Maria Spalding. ("Her
mother was a Gallup," Mrs. de Tracy would say, if an