“Dear,” said Laura, entering softly as she might have entered a death chamber.  “You will see Aunt Rosa and Aunt Sophy, will you not?”

Angela did not stop in her nervous walk, but when she reached the end of the long room she made a quick, feverish gesture, raising her hands to push back her beautiful loosened hair.  “I will do anything you wish, Laura, except see their husbands.”

“I’ve ceased to urge that, Aunt Angela, but your own sisters—­”

“Oh, I will see them,” returned Angela, as if the words—­as if any speech, in fact—­were wrung from the cold reserve which had frozen her from head to foot.

Laura went up to her and, with the impassioned manner which she had inherited from her Southern mother, enclosed her in a warm and earnest embrace.  “My dear, my dear,” she said, “Uncle Percival tells me that this is one of your bad days.  He says, poor man, that he went out and got you flowers.”

Angela yielded slowly, still without melting from her icy remoteness.  “They were tuberoses,” she responded, in a voice which was in itself effectual comment.

“Tuberoses!” exclaimed Laura aghast, “when you can’t even stand the scent of lilies.  No wonder, poor dear, that your head aches.”

“Mary put them outside on the window sill,” said Angela, in a kind of resigned despair, “but their awful perfume seemed to penetrate the glass, so she took them down into the coal cellar.”

“And a very good place for them, too,” was Laura’s feeling rejoinder; “but you mustn’t blame him,” she charitably concluded, “for he couldn’t have chosen any other flower if he had had the whole Garden of Eden to select from.  It isn’t really his fault after all—­it’s a part of fatality like his flute.”

“He played for me until my head almost split,” remarked Angela wearily, “and then he apologised for stopping because his breath was short.”

A startled tremor shook through her as a step was heard on the staircase.  “Who is it, Laura?”

Laura went quickly to the door and, after pausing a moment outside, returned with a short, flushed, and richly gowned little woman who was known to the world as Mrs. Robert Bleeker.

More than twenty years ago, as the youngest of the pretty Wilde sisters, she had, in the romantic fervour of her youth and in spite of the opposition of her parents, made a love match with a handsome, impecunious young dabbler in “stocks.”  “Sophy is a creature of sentiment,” her friends had urged in extenuation of a marriage which was not then considered in a brilliant light, but to the surprise of everybody, after the single venture by which she had proved the mettle of her dreams, she had sunk back into a prosperous and comfortable mediocrity.  She had made her flight—­like the queen bee she had soared once into the farthest, bluest reaches of her heaven, and henceforth she was quite content to relapse into the utter commonplaces of the hive.  Her yellow hair grew sparse and flat and streaked with gray, her pink-rose face became over plump and mottled across the nose, and her mind turned soon as flat and unelastic as her body; but she was perfectly satisfied with the portion she had had from life, for, having weighed all things, she had come to regard the conventions as of most enduring worth.