way downstairs, and her companions remained face to face.

"Ask my sister--I think she will tell you," said Olive, turning away
from him and going to the window. She remained there, looking out; she
heard the door of the house close, and saw the two cross the street
together. As they passed out of sight her fingers played, softly, a
little air upon the pane; it seemed to her that she had had an
inspiration.

Basil Ransom, meanwhile, put the question to Mrs. Luna. "If she was not
going to like me, why in the world did she write to me?"

"Because she wanted you to know me--she thought _I_ would like you!" And
apparently she had not been wrong; for Mrs. Luna, when they reached
Beacon Street, would not hear of his leaving her to go her way alone,
would not in the least admit his plea that he had only an hour or two
more in Boston (he was to travel, economically, by the boat) and must
devote the time to his business. She appealed to his Southern chivalry,
and not in vain; practically, at least, he admitted the rights of women.

XIII

Mrs. Tarrant was delighted, as may be imagined, with her daughter's
account of Miss Chancellor's interior, and the reception the girl had
found there; and Verena, for the next month, took her way very often to
Charles Street. "Just you be as nice to her as you know how," Mrs.
Tarrant had said to her; and she reflected with some complacency that
her daughter did know--she knew how to do everything of that sort. It
was not that Verena had been taught; that branch of the education of
young ladies which is known as "manners and deportment" had not figured,
as a definite head, in Miss Tarrant's curriculum. She had been told,
indeed, that she must not lie nor steal; but she had been told very
little else about behaviour; her only great advantage, in short, had
been the parental example. But her mother liked to think that she was
quick and graceful, and she questioned her exhaustively as to the
progress of this interesting episode; she didn't see why, as she said,
it shouldn't be a permanent "stand-by" for Verena. In Mrs. Tarrant's
meditations upon the girl's future she had never thought of a fine
marriage as a reward of effort; she would have deemed herself very
immoral if she had endeavoured to capture for her child a rich husband.
She had not, in fact, a very vivid sense of the existence of such agents
of fate; all the rich men she had seen already had wives, and the
unmarried men, who