t forward this identifying
fact, Helen said that she knew him and liked him very much.

'I suppose you know a great many people,' said Althea.

Yes, Miss Buchanan replied, she supposed she did. 'Too many, sometimes.
One gets sick of them, don't you think? But perhaps your people are
more interesting than mine; you travel so much, and seem to know such
heaps of them all over the world.'

But Althea, from these interviews, took a growing impression that though
Miss Buchanan might be sick of her own people, she would be far more
sick of hers.

CHAPTER V.

Miss Buchanan was well on the way to complete recovery, was able to have
tea every afternoon with Althea, and to be taken for long drives in the
Bois, when Aunt Julia and the girls arrived at the Hotel Talleyrand.

Mrs. Pepperell was a sister of Althea's mother, and lived soberly and
solidly in New York, disapproving as much of millionaires and their
manners as of expatriated Americans. She was large and dressed with
immaculate precision and simplicity, and had it not been for a homespun
quality of mingled benevolence and shrewdness, she might have passed as
stately. But Mrs. Pepperell had no wish to appear stately, and was
rather intolerant of the pretension in others. Her sharp tongue had
indulged itself in a good many sallies on this score at her sister
Bessie's expense; Bessie being the lady of the lorgnette, Althea's
deceased mother.

Althea, remembering that dear mother so well, all dignified elegance as
she had been--too dignified, too elegant, perhaps, to be either so
shrewd or so benevolent as her sister--always thought of Aunt Julia as
rather commonplace in comparison. Yet, as she followed in her wake on
the evening of her arrival, she felt that Aunt Julia was obviously and
eminently 'nice.' The one old-fashioned diamond ornament at her throat,
the ruffles at her wrist, the gloss of her silver-brown hair, reminded
her of her own mother's preferences.

The girls were 'nice,' too, as far as their appearance and breeding
went, but Althea found their manners very bad. They were not strident
and they were not arrogant, but so much noisiness and so much innocent
assurance might, to unsympathetic eyes, seem so. They were handsome
girls, fresh-skinned, athletic, tall and slender. They wore beautifully
simple white lawn dresses, and their shining fair hair was brushed off
their foreheads and tied at the back with black bows in a very becoming
fashion, t