they meant
to be beforehand with her. They talked with unwonted vivacity and in
a louder tone than was their custom. But as they drank their tea even
their utmost verbosity could not make them oblivious to the fact that
the perfume of sweet lavender was stealing insidiously through the room.
They tacitly refused to recognize this odor and all that it indicated,
when suddenly, with a sharp crash, one of the old Carew tea-cups
fell from the tea-table to the floor and was broken. The disaster was
followed by what sounded like a sigh of pain and dismay.

"I didn't suppose Miss Lydia Carew would ever be as awkward as that,"
cried the younger Miss Boggs, petulantly.

"Prudence," said her sister with a stern accent, "please try not to be a
fool. You brushed the cup off with the sleeve of your dress."

"Your theory wouldn't be so bad," said Miss Prudence, half laughing and
half crying, "if there were any sleeves to my dress, but, as you see,
there aren't," and then Miss Prudence had something as near hysterics as
a healthy young woman from the West can have.

"I wouldn't think such a perfect lady as Lydia Carew," she ejaculated
between her sobs, "would make herself so disagreeable! You may
talk about good-breeding all you please, but I call such intrusion
exceedingly bad taste. I have a horrible idea that she likes us and
means to stay with us. She left those other people because she did not
approve of their habits or their grammar. It would be just our luck to
please her."

"Well, I like your egotism," said Miss Boggs.

However, the view Miss Prudence took of the case appeared to be the
right one. Time went by and Miss Lydia Carew still remained. When the
ladies entered their drawing-room they would see the little lady-like
Daguerrotype revolving itself into a blur before one of the family
portraits. Or they noticed that the yellow sofa cushion, toward which
she appeared to feel a peculiar antipathy, had been dropped behind the
sofa upon the floor, or that one of Jane Austen's novels, which none of
the family ever read, had been removed from the book shelves and left
open upon the table.

"I cannot become reconciled to it," complained Miss Boggs to Miss
Prudence. "I wish we had remained in Iowa where we belong. Of course I
don't believe in the thing! No sensible person would. But still I cannot
become reconciled."

But their liberation was to come, and in a most unexpected manner.

A relative by marriage visited the