her moment was whirled away from that place of many
memories and a solitary hope.

XI.

MISS STUYVESANT.

"She smiled; but he could see arise
Her soul from far adown her eyes."

--MRS. BROWNING.

"She is a beauty; it is only right I should forewarn you of that."

"Dark or light?"

"Dark; that is her hair and eyes are almost oriental in their blackness,
but her skin is fair, almost as dazzling as yours, Ona."

Mrs. Sylvester threw a careless glance in the long mirror before which
she was slowly completing her toilet, and languidly smiled. But whether
at this covert compliment to her greatest charm or at some passing fancy
of her own, it would be difficult to decide. "The dark hair and eyes
come from her father," remarked she in an abstracted way while she tried
the effect of a bunch of snow-white roses at her waist with a backward
toss of her proud blonde head. "His mother was a Greek. 'Tell it not in
Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon,'" she exclaimed in a
voice as nearly gay as her indolent nature would allow. For this lady of
fashion was in one of her happiest moods. Her dress, a new one, fitted
her to perfection and the vision mirrored in the glass before her was
not lacking, so far as she could see in one charm that could captivate.
"Do you think she could fasten a ribbon, or arrange a bow?" she further
inquired. "I should like to have some one about me with a knack for
helping a body in an emergency, if possible. Sarah is absolutely the
destruction of any bit of ribbon she undertakes to handle. Look at that
knot of black velvet over there for instance, wouldn't you think a raw
Irish girl just from the other side would have known better than to tie
it with half the wrong side showing?"

With the habit long ago acquired of glancing wherever her ivory finger
chanced to point, the grave man of the world slowly turned his head full
of the weightiest cares and oppressed by the burden of innumerable
responsibilities, and surveyed the cluster of velvet bows thus
indicated, with a mechanical knitting of the brows.

"I pay Sarah twenty-five dollars a month and that is the result," his
wife proceeded. "Now if Paula--"

"Paula is not to come here as a waiting maid," her husband quickly
interposed, a suspicion of color just showing itself for a moment on his
cheek.

"If Paula," his wife went on, unheeding the interruption save by casting
him a hurried glance over the shoulder of h