in the week if that rattle-pated little sister of his should bid him.  The men in this country, said the Baroness, are evidently very obliging.  Her declaration that she was looking for rest and retirement had been by no means wholly untrue; nothing that the Baroness said was wholly untrue.  It is but fair to add, perhaps, that nothing that she said was wholly true.  She wrote to a friend in Germany that it was a return to nature; it was like drinking new milk, and she was very fond of new milk.  She said to herself, of course, that it would be a little dull; but there can be no better proof of her good spirits than the fact that she thought she should not mind its being a little dull.  It seemed to her, when from the piazza of her eleemosynary cottage she looked out over the soundless fields, the stony pastures, the clear-faced ponds, the rugged little orchards, that she had never been in the midst of so peculiarly intense a stillness; it was almost a delicate sensual pleasure.  It was all very good, very innocent and safe, and out of it something good must come.  Augustine, indeed, who had an unbounded faith in her mistress’s wisdom and far-sightedness, was a great deal perplexed and depressed.  She was always ready to take her cue when she understood it; but she liked to understand it, and on this occasion comprehension failed.  What, indeed, was the Baroness doing dans cette galere? what fish did she expect to land out of these very stagnant waters?  The game was evidently a deep one.  Augustine could trust her; but the sense of walking in the dark betrayed itself in the physiognomy of this spare, sober, sallow, middle-aged person, who had nothing in common with Gertrude Wentworth’s conception of a soubrette, by the most ironical scowl that had ever rested upon the unpretending tokens of the peace and plenty of the Wentworths.  Fortunately, Augustine could quench skepticism in action.  She quite agreed with her mistress—­or rather she quite out-stripped her mistress—­in thinking that the little white house was pitifully bare.  “Il faudra,” said Augustine, “lui faire un peu de toilette.”  And she began to hang up portieres in the doorways; to place wax candles, procured after some research, in unexpected situations; to dispose anomalous draperies over the arms of sofas and the backs of chairs.  The Baroness had brought with her to the New World a copious provision of the element of costume; and the two Miss Wentworths, when they came over to see her, were somewhat bewildered by the obtrusive distribution of her wardrobe.  There were India shawls suspended, curtain-wise, in the parlor door, and curious fabrics, corresponding to Gertrude’s metaphysical vision of an opera-cloak, tumbled about in the sitting-places.  There were pink silk blinds in the windows, by which the room was strangely bedimmed; and along the chimney-piece was disposed a remarkable band of velvet, covered with coarse, dirty-looking lace.  “I have been making myself a little comfortable,” said