“Is your mother asleep?”

“I hope so.  She sent me away that she might get a nap.”

“Just now I stumbled upon a passage which reminded me so vividly of the imaginary home you last week painted for us, somewhere along the Pacific shore, that I thought I would show it to you.  That home, where you hope to indulge your bucolic tastes, your childish fondness for pets—­doves, rabbits, pheasants—­and similar rustic appendages to our cottage—­in—­the—­air.  Here, read it, aloud if you will.”

She glanced over the lines, smiled, and read: 

“’Mong the green lanes of Kent stood an antique home
Within its orchard, rich with ruddy fruits;
For the full year was laughing in his prime. 
Wealth of all flowers grew in that garden green,
And the old porch with its great oaken door
Was smothered in rose-blooms, while o’er the walls
The honeysuckle clung deliciously. 
Before the door there lay a plot of grass
Snowed o’er with daisies,—­flower by all beloved,
And famousest in song,—­and in the midst
A carved fountain stood,... 
On which a peacock perched and sunned itself;
Beneath, two petted rabbits, snowy white,
Squatted upon the sward. 
A row of poplars darkly rose behind,
Around whose tops, and the old-fashioned vanes,
White pigeons fluttered; and over all was bent
The mighty sky, with sailing, sunny clouds.”

“Thank you, Uncle Orme.  The picture is as sweet as its honeysuckle blooms, and some day we will frame it with California mountains, and call it Home.  I shall only want to add a gently sloping field, wherein pearly short-horns stand ankle deep in clover, while my dear old dog Hero basks upon the doorstep; and upon the lawn,—­

’An almond tree
Pink with her blossom and alive with bees,
Standing against the azure.’”

“Yonder come the letters.”

As he spoke, Mr. Chesley left the room, and soon after a servant entered with a letter addressed to Regina.

It was from Olga, dated Baden-baden; and the vein of subdued yet hopeless melancholy that wandered through its contents, now and then intertwined strangely with a thread of her old grim humour.

“Do you ever hear from that legal sphinx—­Erle Palma?  Mamma only now and then receives epistles fashioned after those once in vogue in Laconia. (I wonder if even the old toothless gossips in Sparta were ever laconic?) I am truly sorry for Erle Palma.  That beautifully crystallized quartz heart of his is no doubt being ground between the upper and nether millstones of his love and his pride; and Hymen ought to charge him heavy mill-toll.  My dear, have you seen Elliott Roscoe’s little tinted-paper poem?  Of course his apostrophe to ‘violet eyes, overlaced with jet!’ will sound quite Tennysonian to a certain little shy girl, now hiding at Como, and who ’inspired the strain.’  But aside from the pleasant association that links you