The dear lady had listened with her eyes fixed on Peter.  It was but another of his benevolent finds; it had been the son of an old music teacher the winter before, and a boy struggling through college last spring;—­always somebody who wanted to get ahead in one direction or another, no matter how impracticable his ambitions might be.  This young man, however, seemed different; certain remarks had a true ring.  Perhaps, after all, her foolish old brother—­foolish when his heart misled him—­might have found somebody at last who would pay for the time he spent upon him.  The name, too, had a familiar sound.  She was quite sure the aunt must be the same rather over-dressed persistent young widow who had flitted in and out of Washington society the last year of her own stay in the capital.  She had finally married a rich New York man of the same name.  So she had heard.

The tea to which Jack and Corinne were invited was the result of this conversation.  Trust Miss Felicia for doing the right thing and in the right way, whatever her underlying purpose might be; and then again she must look this new protege over.

Peter at once joined in the project.  Nothing pleased him so much as a function of any kind in which his dear sister was the centre of attraction, and this was always the case.  Was not Mrs. McGuffey put to it, at these same teas, to know what to do with the hats and coats, and the long and short cloaks and overshoes, and lots of other things beside—­umbrellas and the like—­whenever Miss Felicia came to town?  And did not the good woman have many of the cards of the former function hidden in her bureau drawer to show her curious friends just how grand a lady Miss Felicia was?  General Waterbury, U.S.A., commanding the Department of the East, with headquarters at Governors Island, was one of them.  And so were Colonel Edgerton, Judge Lambert and Mrs. Lambert; and His Excellency the French Ambassador, whom she had known as an attache and who was passing through the city and had been overjoyed to leave a card; as well as Sir Anthony Broadstairs, who expected to spend a week with her in her quaint home in Geneseo, but who had made it convenient to pay his respects in Fifteenth Street instead:  to say nothing of the Coleridges, Thomases, Bordeauxs and Worthing tons, besides any number of people from Washington Square, with plenty more from Murray Hill and be yond.

Peter in his enthusiasm had made a mental picture of a repetition of all this and had already voiced it in the suggestion of these and various other prominent names, “when Miss Felicia stopped him with: 

“No, Peter—­No.  It’s not to be a museum of fossils, but a garden full of rosebuds; nobody with a strand of gray hair will be invited.  As for the lame, the halt and the blind, they can come next week.  I’ve just been looking you over, Peter; you are getting old and wrinkled and pretty soon you’ll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you.  The Major,