generous
sprinkling of freckles on her inquisitive nose. But it was a lovable
face, happy and eager, with a sweet mouth and alert gray eyes that
seemed to see to the bottom of everything. Sometimes its expression made
it almost beautiful. This was one of the times.

She was not gazing regretfully after the departed 'bus as Hawkins
surmised, but with a pleasure so keen that it fairly made her catch her
breath, she was looking at the strange landscape and recognizing places
here and there, made familiar by kodak pictures, and the enthusiastic
descriptions of old pupils. There was the long flight of marble steps
leading down the stately terraces to the river--the beautiful
willow-fringed Potomac. There was the pergola overhung with Abbotsford
ivy, and the wonderful old garden with the sun-dial, and the
rhododendrons from Killarney. She had heard so much about this place
that it had grown to be a sort of enchanted land of dreams to her, and
now the thought that she was actually here in the midst of it made her
draw in her breath with a delicious little shiver.

Hawkins, from his peep-hole through one of the mullioned sidelights of
the great entrance, to which he had now advanced, saw the shiver, and
misinterpreting it, suddenly opened the door. It gave her such a start,
so absorbed had she been in her surroundings, that she almost toppled
down the steps. But the next instant it was Hawkins who was having the
start. Unabashed by his pompous manner, her keen gray eyes swept him one
quick look from his sphinx-like face to his massive shoe-buckles, as if
she had been given some strange botanical specimen to label and
classify. Without an instant's hesitation she exclaimed in the tone of
one making a delightful discovery, "Why, it's _Hawkins_!"

It was positively uncanny to the man that this stranger on whom he had
never laid eyes before should call him by name. He wondered if she were
one of these new-fangled mind-readers he had been hearing so much about.
It was also upsetting to find that he had been mistaken about her delay
in knocking. There was anything but timidity in the grand air with
which she gave him her card, saying, "Announce me to Madam Chartley,
Hawkins."

She was a plump little body, ill adapted to stately airs and graces, but
she had been rehearsing this entrance mentally for days, and she swept
into the reception room as if she were the daughter of a duke.

"There!" she said to herself as the portieres dr