e floor
above her. She looked up and speculated. Whose boots were they, she
wondered. She then became aware of a swishing sound next door--a woman,
clearly, putting away her dress. It was succeeded by a gentle tapping
sound, such as that which accompanies hair-dressing. It was very
difficult to keep her attention fixed upon the "Prelude." Was it Susan
Warrington tapping? She forced herself, however, to read to the end of
the book, when she placed a mark between the pages, sighed contentedly,
and then turned out the light.

Very different was the room through the wall, though as like in shape
as one egg-box is like another. As Miss Allan read her book, Susan
Warrington was brushing her hair. Ages have consecrated this hour,
and the most majestic of all domestic actions, to talk of love between
women; but Miss Warrington being alone could not talk; she could only
look with extreme solicitude at her own face in the glass. She turned
her head from side to side, tossing heavy locks now this way now that;
and then withdrew a pace or two, and considered herself seriously.

"I'm nice-looking," she determined. "Not pretty--possibly," she drew
herself up a little. "Yes--most people would say I was handsome."

She was really wondering what Arthur Venning would say she was. Her
feeling about him was decidedly queer. She would not admit to herself
that she was in love with him or that she wanted to marry him, yet she
spent every minute when she was alone in wondering what he thought of
her, and in comparing what they had done to-day with what they had done
the day before.

"He didn't ask me to play, but he certainly followed me into the hall,"
she meditated, summing up the evening. She was thirty years of age,
and owing to the number of her sisters and the seclusion of life in a
country parsonage had as yet had no proposal of marriage. The hour of
confidences was often a sad one, and she had been known to jump into
bed, treating her hair unkindly, feeling herself overlooked by life in
comparison with others. She was a big, well-made woman, the red lying
upon her cheeks in patches that were too well defined, but her serious
anxiety gave her a kind of beauty.

She was just about to pull back the bed-clothes when she exclaimed, "Oh,
but I'm forgetting," and went to her writing-table. A brown volume lay
there stamped with the figure of the year. She proceeded to write in the
square ugly hand of a mature child, as she wrote daily ye