fter cards, I
daresay, there would come gossip. It is for this reason," she pursued
with conviction, "that I am trying to persuade Angela to take up a
little bridge."

"A little bridge!" gasped Laura, and from sheer amazement she sat down
on the foot of Angela's couch.

"I was considering the moral support of it, of course," resumed Mrs.
Payne. "First of all I would advise some inspiring religious conviction,
but as religion does not appeal to her, I suggested bridge."

"It might as well be white rabbits, I don't see the difference,"
protested Angela, rolling over upon her side with a despairing movement
of fatigue.

"The difference, my dear, is that white rabbits are dirty little
beasts," observed the elder woman.

Angela lay back upon her sofa and regarded her sister with a smile sharp
and cold as the edge of a knife. "I wonder why you were more fortunate
than I, Rosa," she said, after a pause, "for in my heart I was always a
better woman."

Mrs. Payne laughed her hard little mirthless laugh, and stretched out
her withered hand with a melodramatic gesture. "But I was never a fool,
my dear," was her retort, "and there are few women of whom it can be
said with truth that they were never at any time, from the beginning to
the end of their career, a fool. Nobody is a fool always, but there are
very few people who escape it throughout their lives."

"Oh, I was," sighed Angela submissively, "I know it, but I was
punished."

"It is the one thing for which we can count quite certainly upon being
punished in this life," remarked Mrs. Payne, with a kind of moral
satisfaction, as of one who was ranged upon the side of worldliness if
not of righteousness. "Other sins are for eternity, I suppose, but I
have never yet seen a fool escape the deserts of his folly. It is the
one reason which has always made me believe so firmly in an overruling
Providence. Are you going out, my child?" she asked, as Laura rose.

"I am stifling for want of air," replied the girl, shrinking away from
the unnatural flash of her aunt's eyes. "I'll read to aunt Angela when I
come in, but just now I must get out." Then as Mrs. Payne still sought
to detain her, she broke away and ran rapidly down into the street.

But she was no sooner out of doors than it seemed to her that she ought
to have stayed in her room--that the minutes would have passed more
swiftly in unbroken quiet. Her senses were absorbed in the single desire
to have the day over--