“Who is it?” asked Harriet in rather a hard voice.  Susan regarded Annie with a bewildered, yet kindly smile.  Poor Susan had never regarded the honey pots of life as intended for herself, and thus could feel a kindly interest in their acquisition by others.

“My granddaughter is engaged to be married to Mr. von Rosen,” said the old lady.  Then she stirred her coffee assiduously.

Susan rose and kissed Annie.  “I hope you will be happy, very happy,” she said in an awed voice.  Harriet rose, to follow her sister’s example but she looked viciously at her mother.

“He is a good ten years older than Annie,” she said.

“And a good twenty-five younger than you,” said the old lady, and sipped her coffee delicately.  “He is just the right age for Annie.”

Harriet kissed Annie, but her lips were cold and Annie wondered.  It never occurred to her then, nor later, to imagine that her Aunt Harriet might have had her own dreams which had never entirely ended in rainbow mists.  She did not know how hardly dreams die.  They are sometimes not entirely stamped out during a long lifetime.

That evening Von Rosen came to call on Annie and she received him alone in the best parlour.  She felt embarrassed and shy, but very happy.  Her lover brought her an engagement ring, a great pearl, which had been his mother’s and put it on her finger, and Annie eyed her finger with a big round gaze like a bird’s.  Von Rosen laughed at the girl holding up her hand and staring at the beringed finger.

“Don’t you like it, dear?” he said.

“It is the most beautiful ring I ever saw,” said Annie, “but I keep thinking it may not be true.”

“The truest things in the world are the things which do not seem so,” he said, and caught up the slender hand and kissed the ring and the finger.

Margaret on the verandah had seen Von Rosen enter the Eustace house and had guessed dully at the reason.  She had always thought that Von Rosen would eventually marry Alice Mendon and she wondered a little, but not much.  Her own affairs were entirely sufficient to occupy her mind.  Her position had become more impossible to alter and more ghastly.  That night Wilbur had brought home a present to celebrate her success.  It was something which she had long wanted and which she knew he could ill afford:—­a circlet of topazes for her hair.  She kissed him and put it on to please him, but it was to her as if she were crowned because of her infamy and she longed to snatch the thing off and trample it.  And yet always she was well aware that it was not remorse which she felt, but a miserable humiliation that she, Margaret Edes, should have cause for remorse.  The whole day had been hideous.  The letters and calls of congratulation had been incessant.  There were brief notices in a few papers which had been marked and sent to her and Wilbur had brought them home also.  Her post-office box had been crammed.  There were