in the seclusion
of his own reading-room.

As Wilford's question concerning his sire had been the last one asked,
so it was the last one answered, his mother parting his dark hair with
her jeweled hand, and telling him first that with the exception of a
cold taken at the park on Saturday afternoon when she drove out to try
the new carriage, she was in usual health; second, that Jamie was very
well, but impatient for his uncle's return; third, that Juno was
spending a few days in Orange, and that Bell had gone to pass the night
with her particular friend, Mrs. Meredith, the bluest, most bookish
woman in New York.

"Your father," the lady added, "has not yet returned, but as the dinner
is ready I think we will not wait."

She touched a silver bell beside her, and ordering dinner to be sent up
at once, went on to ask her son concerning his journey, and the people
he had met. But Wilford, though intending to tell her all, for he kept
nothing from his mother, would wait till after dinner. So, offering her
his arm, he led her out to where the table was spread, widely different
from the table prepared for Katy Lennox away among the Silverton hills,
for where at the farmhouse there had been only the homely wares common
to the country, with Aunt Betsy's onions served in a bowl, there was
here the finest of damask, the choicest of china, the costliest of
cut-glass, and the heaviest of silver, with the well-trained waiter
gliding in and out, himself the very personification of strict table
etiquette, such as the Barlows had never dreamed about. There was no
fricasseed chicken here, or flaky crust, with pickled beans and apple
sauce; no custard pie with strawberries and rich, sweet cream, poured
from a blue earthen pitcher, but there were soups, and fish, and roasted
meats, and dishes with French names and taste, and desert elaborately
gotten up and served with the utmost precision, and wines, with fruit
and colored cloth, and handsome finger bowl; and Mrs. Cameron presiding
over all, with the ladylike decorum so much a part of herself, her soft,
glossy silk of brown, with her rich lace and diamond pin seeming in
keeping with herself and her surroundings. And opposite to her Wilford
sat, a tall, dark, handsome man of thirty or thereabouts--a man whose
polished manners betokened at once a perfect knowledge of the world, and
whose face to a close observer indicated how little satisfaction he had
as yet found in that world. He had