“What are you doing, Anna?” said she.

Anna looked up from a snarl of lace and ribbons and gloves in a bureau drawer.  “I am putting things in order,” said she.

Then Mrs. Carroll crossed the hall from her opposite room, and entered, trailing a soft, pink, China-silk dressing-gown.  She sank into a chair with a swirl of lace ruffles and viewed her sister-in-law with a comical air of childish dismay.  “Don’t you feel well, Anna, dear?” asked she.

“Yes.  Why?” replied Anna Carroll, folding a yard of blue ribbon.

“Nothing, only I have always heard that if a person does something she has never done before, something at variance with her character, it is a very bad sign, and I never knew you to put things in order before, Anna, dear.”

“Order is not at variance with my character,” said Anna.  “It is one of my fundamental principles.”

“You never carried it out,” said Mrs. Carroll.  “You know you never did, Anna.  Your bureau drawers have always looked like a sort of chaos of civilization, just like mine.  You know you never carried out the principle, Anna, dear.”

“A principle ceases to be one when it is carried out,” said Anna.

“Then you don’t think you are going to die because you are folding that ribbon, honey?”

Anna took up some yellow ribbon.  “There is much more need to worry about Charlotte,” said she, in the slightly bitter, sarcastic tone which had grown upon her lately.

Mrs. Carroll looked at Charlotte, who had removed her hat and was pinning up her hair at a little glass in a Florentine frame which hung between the windows.  The girl’s face, reflected in the glass, flushed softly, and was seen like a blushing picture in the fanciful frame, although she did not turn her head, and made no rejoinder to her aunt’s remark.

“What has Charlotte been doing?” asked Mrs. Carroll.

“She has been doing the last thing which any Carroll in his or her senses is ever supposed to do,” replied Anna, in the same tone, as she folded her yellow ribbon.

“What do you mean, Anna, dear?”

“She has been paying a bill before the credit was exhausted.  That is sheer insanity in a Carroll.  If there is anything in the old Scotch superstition, she is fey, if ever anybody was.”

“What bill?” asked Mrs. Carroll.

“Mr. Anderson’s,” replied Charlotte, faintly, still without turning from the glass which reflected her charming pink face in its gilt, scrolled frame.

“Mr. Anderson’s?”

“The grocer’s bill,” said Charlotte.

“Oh!  I did not know what his name was,” said Mrs. Carroll.

“He probably is well acquainted with ours, on his books,” said Anna.

Mrs. Carroll looked in a puzzled way from her to Charlotte, who had turned with a little air of defiance.  “Had he refused to let us have any more groceries?” said she.

“No,” said Charlotte.