he said, she might be able to tell him
how true: that in Boston a new medical method had arisen by which the
sick were said to be made well without the help of drugs. Mind cure, he
believed it was called. It seemed very extraordinary, and rather
interesting, if it were not all a fraud or a fable, that persons of the
most prosaic, as these had been described to him, should go about
professing to do for a fee the same thing that saints of old are
recorded to have done through their mysterious powers. The subject had
come into his mind--he went on making conversation--from recently
re-reading a book of George Sand's, _La Petite Fadette_, in which a
cure is performed which seemed to him very similar. If she had not read
the book, she must permit him to bring it for her perusal. He talked
about the book.

A maid brought in a lighted lamp, and, as is the pleasant custom of the
country, wished them a happy evening.

Very soon after it came Aurora, with a dab of flour on one cheek, which
the kitchen fire had warmed to a deeper pink.

"There," she said, "they're all ready for the oven. When we took the
house, all the stove we had was a big stone block thing with little
square holes. The cook fanned them with a turkey-wing. But now we've got
a range. Don't you want me to show you over the house? There'll be just
time before supper."

"I'm afraid it's all dark," said Estelle. "Let me ring and have them
light up. Think of a city house without gas!"

"No, they'd be too long. I can take a lamp."

She went for it to her dressing-room, and came back with one easy to
carry, long in the stem and small in the tank, from which, to make it
brighter, she had lifted off the shade. Gerald reached to take it from
her, but she refused his help.

"The weight's nothing. I want you to be free to look around. Coming,
Estelle?"

"I'll join you in a minute."

They went down the wide stairs side by side. She led through a door, at
the right, as you entered the house, of the main door.

"Here's one of the parlors. We have four on this floor, between big and
little. Four parlors and a dining-room. Doesn't that seem a good many
for two lone women?"

The unshaded lamplight showed a crowd of furniture, modern, muffled,
expensive, the lack of simplicity in design of which was further
rendered dreadful to the artist by every device to make it still less
simple, embroidered scarfs thrown over chair-backs, varicolored textiles
depending from the