laying the long table.  It was too early for the florist, and the centre of the table was empty, but down the sides were gold baskets heaped with pulpy summer fruits-figs, strawberries and big blushing nectarines.  Between them stood crystal decanters with red and yellow wine, and little dishes full of sweets; and against the walls were sideboards with great pieces of gold and silver, ewers and urns and branching candelabra, which sprinkled the green marble walls with starlike reflections.

After a while he grew tired of watching the coming and going of white-sleeved footmen, and of listening to the butler’s vociferated orders, and strayed back into the library.  The habit of solitude had given him a passion for the printed page, and if he could have found a book anywhere—­any kind of a book—­he would have forgotten the long hours and the empty house.  But the tables in the library held only massive unused inkstands and immense immaculate blotters; not a single volume had slipped its golden prison.

His loneliness had grown overwhelming, and he suddenly thought of Mrs. Heeny’s clippings.  His mother, alarmed by an insidious gain in weight, had brought the masseuse back from New York with her, and Mrs. Heeny, with her old black bag and waterproof, was established in one of the grand bedrooms lined with mirrors.  She had been loud in her joy at seeing her little friend that morning, but four years had passed since their last parting, and her personality had grown remote to him.  He saw too many people, and they too often disappeared and were replaced by others:  his scattered affections had ended by concentrating themselves on the charming image of the gentleman he called his French father; and since his French father had vanished no one else seemed to matter much to him.

“Oh, well,” Mrs. Heeny had said, discerning the reluctance under his civil greeting, “I guess you’re as strange here as I am, and we’re both pretty strange to each other.  You just go and look round, and see what a lovely home your Ma’s got to live in; and when you get tired of that, come up here to me and I’ll give you a look at my clippings.”

The word woke a train of dormant associations, and Paul saw himself seated on a dingy carpet, between two familiar taciturn old presences, while he rummaged in the depths of a bag stuffed with strips of newspaper.

He found Mrs. Heeny sitting in a pink arm-chair, her bonnet perched on a pink-shaded electric lamp and her numerous implements spread out on an immense pink toilet-table.  Vague as his recollection of her was, she gave him at once a sense of reassurance that nothing else in the house conveyed, and after he had examined all her scissors and pastes and nail-polishers he turned to the bag, which stood on the carpet at her feet as if she were waiting for a train.

“My, my!” she said, “do you want to get into that again?  How you used to hunt in it for taffy, to be sure, when your Pa brought you up to Grandma Spragg’s o’ Saturdays!  Well, I’m afraid there ain’t any taffy in it now; but there’s piles and piles of lovely new clippings you ain’t seen.”