“So says your gentler nature.  There are women—­and I believe they are in the majority in this crooked lower sphere—­in whose hearts the monument to departed affection—­when love is indeed no more—­is a hatred that can never die.  But we have wandered an immense distance from the unlucky chicken-thief or burglar overhead.  Dr. Ritchie’s sudden and ostentatious attack of philanthropy will hardly beguile him into watching over his charge—­a guardian angel in dress-coat and white silk neck-tie—­until morning?”

“Mammy is to relieve him so soon as he is convinced that human skill can do nothing for his relief,” said Mabel very gravely.

Her sister-in-law’s high spirits and jocular tone jarred upon her most disagreeably, but she tried to bear in mind in what dissimilar circumstances they had passed the last hour.  If Clara appeared unfeeling, and her remarks were distinguished by less taste than was customary in one so thoroughly bred, it was because the exhilaration of the evening was yet upon her, and she had not seen the death’s-head prone upon the pillows in the cheerless attic.  Thoughts of poverty and dying beds were unseemly in this apartment when the very warmth and fragrance of the air told of fostering and sheltering love.  The heavy curtains did not sway in the blast that hurled its whole fury against the windows; the furniture was handsome, and in perfect harmony with the dark, yet glowing hues of the carpet, and with the tinted walls.  A tall dressing mirror let into a recess reflected the picture, brilliant with firelight that colored the shadows themselves; lengthened into a deep perspective the apparent extent of the chamber and showed, like a fine old painting, the central figure in the vista.

Mrs. Aylett had exchanged her evening dress for a cashmere wrapper, the dark-blue ground of which was enlivened by a Grecian pattern of gold and scarlet; her unbound hair draped her shoulders, and framed her arch face, as she threaded the bronze ripples with her fingers.  She looked contented, restful, complacent in herself and her belongings—­one whom Time had touched lovingly as he swept by, and whom sorrow had forgotten.

“Not asleep yet!” was her husband’s exclamation, entering before anything further passed between the two women; and when his sister started up, with an apology for being found there at so late an hour, he added, more reproachfully than he ever spoke to his wife, “You should not have kept her up, Mabel!  Her strength has been too much taxed already to-night.  I hoped and believed that she had been in bed and asleep for an hour.”

“Don’t blame her!” said Mrs. Aylett, hastily.  “I called her in as she was proceeding to bed in the most decorous manner possible.  I may as well own the truth of my weakness.  I was nervously wakeful—­the effect, in part, of the ultra-strong coffee Dr. Ritchie advised me to drink at supper-tine—­in part, of the silly sensation I got up to terrify my friends.  So I maneuvered to secure a fireside companion until you should have dispatched your cigar.  Gossip is as pleasant a sedative to ladies as is a prime Havana to their lords.”