d her into
his arms, check and all, remarking that she was a goose; and when she
tried to argue about it a little, he ruled the situation with a strong
paternal hand. She was to buy herself pretties with that money, he said;
and there, there, he didn't want to hear any more foolishness about it.
No more Alphonse and Gaspard, as the fellow said....

"And, Cally," he added, pinching her cheek, "I want you to have a good
time this winter, remember. You can have anything you want. Go
everywhere you're invited--enjoy yourself with your friends--have a good
time. D'you hear me?"

She said that she did: and as she spoke, a bitter question rose at her.
Who were her friends? She had always thought of herself as having many;
"hosts of friends" had always figured prominently in her inventories of
her blessings. But what was a friend? Among all these people she had
spent her life with, there was not one, it seemed, who cared to
understand the infinite shadings of thought and impulse that had brought
her to where she now stood; much less one heart which saw intuitively

All the world's coarse thumb
And finger failed to plumb...

Papa was adding, with an unconscious frown:

"The cash is in the bank, if your mother must have it. I'd laid it by
for something else, though--make some repairs at the Works. Come in....
I reckon I've staved off ..."

Considered from one angle, these fragmentary words might have been
illuminating; but Cally did not even hear them. At that moment there
happened the unexpected. The parlormaid Annie entered, announcing Mrs.
Berkeley Page to see Miss Carlisle.

Surprise was expressed in the study. This was the lady who had said that
the Heths were very improbable people. Papa opined, somewhat glumly,
that she had come to beg funds for the confounded Settlement. Cally,
having looked at herself in the mirror, trailed into the drawing-room
with a somewhat cool and challenging civility.

But her coolness soon melted away, under the visitor's strange but
seemingly genuine cordiality. It became clear that she had come in the
vein of amity, and without sinister motives; though why, if not for
Settlement funds, could not be imagined.

Mrs. Page was a tall, pleasant-faced woman, still on the right side of
forty, a widow whose husband had left her too much of this world's goods
for her ever to be classed as a poorhouse Tory; and despite the fact
that she was a leader in the old-school, as opposed to t