“Oh!  I am careful.  Mamma is here, you know, all the while; and I never receive except she is present.”

John sat abstractedly fingering the various objects on the table; then he opened a drawer in the same mechanical manner.

“Why, Lillie! what’s this? what in the world are these?”

“O John! sure enough! well, there is something I was going to ask you about.  Danforth used always to be sending me things, you know, before we were married,—­flowers and confectionery, and one thing or other; and, since I have been here now, he has done the same, and I really didn’t know what to do about it.  You know I didn’t want to quarrel with him, or get his ill-will; he’s a high-spirited fellow, and a man one doesn’t want for an enemy; so I have just passed it over easy as I could.”

“But, Lillie, a box of cigarettes!—­of course, they can be of no use to you.”

“Of course:  they are only a sort of curiosity that he imports from Spain with his cigars.”

“I’ve a great mind to send them back to him myself,” said John.

“Oh, don’t, John! why, how it would look! as if you were angry, or thought he meant something wrong.  No; I’ll contrive a way to give ’em back without offending him.  I am up to all such little ways.”

“Come, now,” she added, “don’t let’s be cross just the little time you have to stay with me.  I do wish our house were not all torn up, so that I could go home with you, and leave Newport and all its bothers behind.”

“Well, Lillie, you could go, and stay with me at Gracie’s,” said John, brightening at this proposition.

“Dear Gracie,—­so she has got a house all to herself; how I shall miss her! but, really, John, I think she will be happier.  Since you would insist on revolutionizing our house, you know”—­

“But, Lillie, it was to please you.”

“Oh, I know it! but you know I begged you not to.  Well, John, I don’t think I should like to go in and settle down on Grace; perhaps, as I am here, and the sea-air and bathing strengthens me so, we may as well put it through.  I will come home as soon as the house is done.”

“But perhaps you would want to go with me to New York to select the furniture?”

“Oh, the artist does all that!  Charlie Ferrola will give his orders to Simon & Sauls, and they will do every thing up complete.  It’s the way they all do—­saves lots of trouble.”

John went home, after three days spent in Newport, feeling that Lillie was somehow an injured fair one, and that the envious world bore down always on beauty and prosperity.

But incidentally he heard and overheard much that made him uneasy.  He heard her admired as a “bully” girl, a “fast one;” he heard of her smoking, he overheard something about “painting.”

The time was that John thought Lillie an embryo angel,—­an angel a little bewildered and gone astray, and with wings a trifle the worse for the world’s wear,—­but essentially an angel of the same nature with his own revered mother.