John’s bachelor apartments had been new furnished, and furbished, and made into a perfect bower of roses.

The rest of the house, after the usual household process of purification, had been rearranged, as John and his sister had always kept it since their mother’s death in the way that she loved to see it.  There was something quaint and sweet and antique about it, that suited Grace.  Its unfashionable difference from the smart, flippant, stereotyped rooms of to-day had a charm in her eyes.

Lillie, however, surveyed the scene, the first night that she took possession, with a quiet determination to re-modernize on the very earliest opportunity.  What would Mrs. Frippit and Mrs. Nippit say to such rooms, she thought.  But then there was time enough to attend to that.  Not a shade of these internal reflections was visible in her manner.  She said, “Oh, how sweet!  How perfectly charming!  How splendid!” in all proper places; and John was delighted.

She also fell into the arms of Grace, and kissed her with effusion; and John saw the sisterly union, which he had anticipated, auspiciously commencing.

The only trouble in Grace’s mind was from a terrible sort of clairvoyance that seems to beset very sincere people, and makes them sensitive to the presence of any thing unreal or untrue.  Fair and soft and caressing as the new sister was, and determined as Grace was to believe in her, and trust her, and like her,—­she found an invisible, chilly barrier between her heart and Lillie.  She scolded herself, and, in the effort to confide, became unnaturally demonstrative, and said and did more than was her wont to show affection; and yet, to her own mortification, she found herself, after all, seeming to herself to be hypocritical, and professing more than she felt.

As to the fair Lillie, who, as we have remarked, was no fool, she took the measure of her new sister with that instinctive knowledge of character which is the essence of womanhood.  Lillie was not in love with John, because that was an experience she was not capable of.  But she had married him, and now considered him as her property, her subject,—­hers, with an intensity of ownership that should shut out all former proprietors.

We have heard much talk, of late, concerning the husband’s ownership of the wife.  But, dear ladies, is that any more pronounced a fact than every wife’s ownership of her husband?—­an ownership so intense and pervading that it may be said to be the controlling nerve of womanhood.  Let any one touch your right to the first place in your husband’s regard, and see!

Well, then, Lillie saw at a glance just what Grace was, and what her influence with her brother must be; and also that, in order to live the life she meditated, John must act under her sway, and not under his sister’s; and so the resolve had gone forth, in her mind, that Grace’s dominion in the family should come to an end, and that she would, as sole empress, reconstruct the state.  But, of course, she was too wise to say a word about it.