Meantime, in Edith’s room Arthur was virtually superintending the making of his wife’s evening toilet, a most unprecedented employment for mankind in general, and him in particular.  But for some reason wholly inexplicable to Edith, Arthur was unusually anxious about her personal appearance, suggesting among other things that she should wear a thin pink muslin, which he knew so well became her dark style of beauty; and when she reminded him of its shortcomings with regard to waist and sleeves, he answered playfully,

“That does not matter.  ’Twill make you look girlish and young.”

So Edith donned the pink dress, and clasping upon her neck and arms the delicate ornaments made from Nina’s hair, asked of Arthur, “How she looked.”

“Splendidly,” he replied, “Handsomer even than on our bridal night.”

And Edith was handsomer than on the night when she stood at the altar a bride, for six years of almost perfect happiness had chased away the restless, careworn, sorrowful look which was fast becoming habitual, and now, at twenty-six, Edith St. Claire was pronounced by the world the most strikingly beautiful woman of her age.  Poets had sung of her charms, artists had transferred them to canvas; brainless beaux, who would as soon rave about a married woman as a single one, provided it were the fashion so to do, had stamped them upon their hearts; envious females had picked them all to pieces, declaring her too tall, too black, too hoydenish to be even pretty; while little Dick and Nina likened her to the angels, wondering if there were anything in heaven, save Aunt Nina, as beautiful as she.  And this was Edith, who when her toilet was completed went down to meet Grace Atherton just arrived and greatly flurried when she heard that Richard had come.  Very earnestly the two ladies were talking together when Arthur glanced in for a moment and then hastened up to Richard, whom he found sitting by the window, with Dick and Nina both seated in his lap, the former utterly astounded at the accuracy with which his blind uncle guessed every time how many fingers he held up!

“Father! father!” he screamed, as Arthur came in, “He can see just as good as if he wasn’t blind!” and he looked with childish curiosity into the eyes which had discovered in his infantile features more than one trace of the Swedish Petrea, grandmother to the boy.

Arthur smiled and without replying to his son, said to Richard,

“I have come now to take you to Edith.  Grace Atherton is there, too—­a wonderfully young and handsome woman for forty-two.  I am not sure that you can tell them apart.

“I could tell your wife from all the world,” was Richard’s answer, as putting down the children and resuming the green shade, he went with Arthur to the door of the library, where Grace and Edith, standing with their backs to them were too much engaged to notice that more than Arthur was coming.

Him Edith heard, and turning towards him she was about to speak, when Richard lowered the green shade he had raised for a single moment, and walking up to her took her hand in his.  Twining his fingers around her slender wrist he said to her,