twisted itself round and worked the other way.  The plantation, always slackly managed, saw itself now on the high road to destruction.  Let her do the very best in her power, she found it impossible to plan her season’s campaign, to carry it out, to audit her accounts, to study agricultural directions, to preserve the peace, to keep her fences in order, to attend to the sick, to rule her household and her spirit, to dispose of her harvest, and to bring either end of the thread out of the tangled skein of her affairs.

Perhaps there could have been really no better thing for Eloise than the diversion from her sorrow which all this perplexity necessarily in some degree occasioned.

As for Mrs. Arles, so soon as Eloise had begun to move about again, she had taken herself off on a long-promised visit to the West, and was but just returning with the October weather.

Eloise, worn and thin, and looking nearly forty, as she had remarked to herself that morning in the brief moment she could snatch for her toilet, welcomed the cool and quiet little Mrs. Arles, who might be forty, but looked any age between twenty and thirty, with affectionate warmth, and made all the world bestir themselves for her comfort.  It is only justice to the owner of the little Andalusian foot to say that in her specific domain things immediately changed for the better.  But that was merely within-doors, and because she tightened the reins and used the whip in a manner which Eloise could not have done, if the whole equipage tumbled to pieces about her ears.

Mrs. Arles had been at home a week or so; the evening was chilly with rain, and a little fire flickered on the hearth.  Mrs. Arles sat on one side of the hearth, with her tatting in hand; Eloise bent above the papers scattered over a small table.

“See what it is to go away!” said Eloise, cheerily.  “It’s like light in a painting, as the Sisters used to say,—­brings out all the shadows.”

“Nobody knew how indispensable I was,” said the other lady, with the fragment of expression in the phantom of a smile.

“How pleasant it is to be missed!  I did miss you so,—­it seemed as if one of the four sides of the walls were gone.  Now we stand—­what is that word of Aristotle’s?—­four-square again.  Now our universe is on wheels.  Just tell me how you tamed Hazel so.  She has conducted like a little wild gorilla all summer,—­and here, in the twinkling of an eye, she goes about soberly, like a baptized Christian.  How?”

“By a process of induction.”

“You don’t mean”—­

“Oh, no.  Nothing of the kind.  I didn’t touch her.  I sent her into my room, and told her to take down that little riding-switch hanging over the mantel”—­

“What,—­the ebony and gold?”

“Yes.  And to whip all the flies out of the air with it.  It makes a monstrous whizzing.  There’s no such thing as actual experience for these imps of the vivid nerves.  And when she came down I looked at her, and asked her how she liked the singing.  Her conduct now leads me to believe that she has no desire to hear the tune again.”