At dinner Sylvia ate nothing, and did not talk.  Neither Henry nor Horace said much.  In the afternoon Horace went out to make some arrangements which he had taken upon himself with regard to the dead woman, and presently Henry followed him.  Sylvia worked with feverish energy all the afternoon setting a room in order for her expected guest.  It was a pretty room, with an old-fashioned paper—­a sprawling rose pattern on a tarnished satin ground.  The room overlooked the grove, and green branches pressed close against two windows.  There was a pretty, old-fashioned dressing-table between the front windows, and Sylvia picked a bunch of flowers and put them in a china vase, and set it under the glass, and thought of the girl’s face which it would presently reflect.

“I wonder if she looks like her mother,” she thought.  She stood gazing at the glass, and shivered as though with cold.  Then she started at a sound of wheels outside.  In front of the house was Leander Willard, who kept the livery-stable of East Westland.  He was descending in shambling fashion over the front wheels, steadying at the same time a trunk on the front seat; and Horace Allen sprang out of the back of the carriage and assisted a girl in a flutter of dark-blue skirts and veil.  “She’s come!” said Sylvia.

Chapter VIII

Sylvia gave a hurried glance at her hair in the glass.  It shone like satin with a gray-gold lustre, folded back smoothly from her temples.  She eyed with a little surprise the red spots of excitement which still remained on her cheeks.  The changelessness of her elderly visage had been evident to her so long that she was startled to see anything else.  “I look as if I had been pulled through a knot-hole,” she muttered.

She took off her gingham apron, thrust it hastily into a bureau drawer in the next room, and tied on a clean white one with a hemstitched border.  Then she went down-stairs, the starched white bow of the apron-strings covering her slim back like a Japanese sash.  She heard voices in the south room, and entered with a little cough.  Horace and the new-comer were standing there talking.  The moment Sylvia entered, Horace stepped forward.  “I hardly know how to introduce you,” he said; “I hardly know the relationship.  But, Mrs. Whitman, here is Miss Fletcher—­Miss Rose Fletcher.”

“Who accepts your hospitality with the utmost gratitude,” said Miss Rose Fletcher, extending a little hand in a wonderful loose gray travelling glove.  Mrs. Whitman took the offered hand and let it drop.  She was rigid and prim.  She smiled, but the smile was merely a widening of her thin, pale, compressed lips.  She looked at the girl with gray eyes, which had a curious blank sharpness in them.  Rose Fletcher was so very well dressed, so very redolent of good breeding and style, that it was difficult at first to comprehend if that was all.  Finally one perceived that she was a very