person can live down there."

"You would like the place where I'm living. It's a fine large
plantation, and the lady who owns it would be the best of friends to
you. She knew why I was coming, and told me to say she would help to
make your life a happy one if she could."

"It's her told you to come," she replied in quick resentment. "I don't
see what business it is of hers."

Fanny Larimore's strength of determination was not one to hold against
Hosmer's will set to a purpose, during the hour or more that they
talked, he proposing, she finally acquiescing. And when he left her,
it was with a gathering peace in her heart to feel that his nearness
was something that would belong to her again; but differently as he
assured her. And she believed him, knowing that he would stand to his
promise.

Her life was sometimes very blank in the intervals of street
perambulations and matinees and reading of morbid literature. That
elation which she had felt over her marriage with Hosmer ten years
before, had soon died away, together with her weak love for him, when
she began to dread him and defy him. But now that he said he was ready
to take care of her and be good to her, she felt great comfort in her
knowledge of his honesty.

X

Fanny's Friends.

It was on the day following Hosmer's visit, that Mrs. Lorenzo
Worthington, familiarly known to her friends as Belle Worthington, was
occupied in constructing a careful and extremely elaborate street
toilet before her dressing bureau which stood near the front window of
one of the "flats" opposite Mrs. Larimore's. The Nottingham curtain
screened her effectually from the view of passers-by without hindering
her frequent observance of what transpired in the street.

The lower portion of this lady's figure was draped, or better,
seemingly supported, by an abundance of stiffly starched white
petticoats that rustled audibly at her slightest movement. Her neck
was bare, as were the well shaped arms that for the past five minutes
had been poised in mid-air, in the arrangement of a front of
exquisitely soft blonde curls, which she had taken from her "top
drawer" and was adjusting, with the aid of a multitude of tiny
invisible hair-pins, to her own very smoothly brushed hair. Yellow
hair it was, with a suspicious darkness about the roots, and a
streakiness about the back, that to an observant eye would have more
than hinted that art had assisted nature in coloring Mrs.
Worthing