s a faded but still handsome woman. Yet she wore that peculiar
long, limp, formless house-shawl which in certain phases of Anglo-Saxon
spinster and widowhood assumes the functions of the recluse's veil and
announces the renunciation of worldly vanities and a resigned
indifference to external feminine contour. The most audacious
masculine arm would shrink from clasping that shapeless void in which
the flatness of asceticism or the heavings of passion might alike lie
buried. She had also in some mysterious way imported into the fresh
and pleasant room a certain bombaziny shadow of the past, and a
suggestion of that appalling reminiscence known as "better days."
Though why it should be always represented by ashen memories, or why
better days in the past should be supposed to fix their fitting symbol
in depression in the present, Mr. Bly was too young and too preoccupied
at the moment to determine. He only knew that he was a little
frightened of her, and fixed his gaze with a hopeless fascination on a
letter which she somewhat portentously carried under the shawl, and
which seemed already to have yellowed in its arctic shade.

"Mr. Carstone has written to me that you would call," said Mrs. Brooks
with languid formality. "Mr. Carstone was a valued friend of my late
husband, and I suppose has told you the circumstances--the only
circumstances--which admit of my entertaining his proposition of taking
anybody, even temporarily, under my roof. The absence of my dear son
for six months at Portland, Oregon, enables me to place his room at the
disposal of Mr. Carstone's young protege, who, Mr. Carstone tells me,
and I have every reason to believe, is, if perhaps not so seriously
inclined nor yet a church communicant, still of a character and
reputation not unworthy to follow my dear Tappington in our little
family circle as he has at his desk in the bank."

The sensitive Bly, struggling painfully out of an abstraction as to how
he was ever to offer the weekly rent of his lodgings to such a remote
and respectable person, and also somewhat embarrassed at being appealed
to in the third person, here started and bowed.

"The name of Bly is not unfamiliar to me," continued Mrs. Brooks,
pointing to a chair and sinking resignedly into another, where her
baleful shawl at once assumed the appearance of a dust-cover; "some of
my dearest friends were intimate with the Blys of Philadelphia. They
were a branch of the Maryland Blys of the