A Game of Solitaire

I.

THE lamp was lit, and the table drawn close to the fire. In Florence, when the tooth of December is set against the late roses, a fire is a good thing. Elizabeth, being an artist, was indulging herself in the damp luxury of living in an old palazzo, up five flights of stone stairs, and she tended her fire as if it were a shrine. Elizabeth’s family had a slight inclination toward rheumatism, which justified her in the seeming luxury of a blaze.

Naturally, when Josephine Bromley tapped out a Spanish fandango-sort-of summons on the door, it cost Elizabeth, knowing immediately who it was, a moment of regret to be obliged to admit so unlooked-for and flighty a factor into her orderly evening.

“ It rains,” announced Phenie, shedding her wraps from her shoulders to the floor, as if they had been autumn leaves or detachable bits of bark that she had done with. “ It rains, and it is as dark as Egypt, and you are a dear, Elizabeth ! ” she said, making straight to the fire and spreading out her thin hands before it.

“ And you are a disgraceful tramp,” responded Elizabeth, with more than a show of sincerity in her tone. “ And besides that, you only call me ‘ a dear ’ because I happen to have common sense, and a fire for you to hover over.”

“Yes, that’s true; and whatever should we poor good-for-nothings do if it were not for you heaven-born worthy ones to look after us?” and Phenie, dropping to her knees, leaned forward in rapturous delight toward the blaze. “ Yes, you are the dearest of dears, Elizabeth ! ”

The “ dearest of dears ” looked scornfully at the pile of wet wraps that lay by the door, and made no response to this flattery, but said, “ I suppose, of course, your feet are wet ? ”

“ Of course,” admitted Phenie promptly, as she rose and held up one slim foot after the other, shaking her head with a look of disapprobation in her face, as if her feet had been guilty of an indiscretion against her own supervision.

“ And your cough doesn’t get any better ? ”

“ Not any better at all,”assented Phenie in an alien, pitying tone which she often used toward herself.

“ You ought to be sent to an asylum, or home,” said Elizabeth, with asperity.

“ I should like to go home,” murmured Phenie plaintively, “ if only to see my little great-grandmother once more.”

Elizabeth sniffed. She thought she knew all of Phenie’s wiles of manner, but she had never before heard of this little great-grandmother that was so dear. “ I never heard you speak of your greatgrandmother before.” The tone seemed to convey a challenge.

“ No, maybe not,” said Phenie sweetly ; “ but you know I must have had one.”

“ I suppose so. I never gave the matter a thought before. You do without so many things that most people consider essential, I did not know what your ideas might be as to grandmothers.”

“ My great-grandmother must have been very much like me when she was young,” Phenie went on meditatively.

“ I wonder, then, that she ever lived to have great-grandchildren.”This was said vengefully.

“ Oh, she didn’t! She only lived to have children.”

“ Then what in the name of common sense are you sentimentalizing over, with all this nonsense about going home to see her ?”

“ Why, I always go and visit her when I am at home. She lies in a sunny, cosy little graveyard on a hill. I love to go there. She must have been delightful when she was alive ! ”

“Like yourself, Phenie, as you mentioned a few minutes ago.”

“Did I say that? Well, I am sure she must have been much like me. In the first place, she looks like me ; there is a picture of her cut in the gray slate headstone. She is represented as lying in a pretty-shaped narrow coffin, and on her arm is the child that died with her. The inscription reads : ‘ In memory of Josephine, the wife of Adoniram Hinton, who departed this life December twentysixth, 1785, in the thirtieth year of her age. On her left arm lieth the infant which died with her.’ Just at this season, Elizabeth ; and is n’t that a pretty thought, — she and her baby asleep all these years together ? ”

“ You are cheerful to-night, Phenie,” was Elizabeth’s only reply.

Phenie held up her flexible hands and moved them rapidly from side to side before her face, “ to make oak leaves out of the flames,” she explained to Elizabeth. Then, rising abruptly, she caught up the guitar and waved it to and fro, Spanish fashion, brushing her fingers across it as it swung, making a sort of breathing harmony, to which she hummed an accompaniment in a high voice which was thin but vibrant. She was slender, almost meagre ; her dark hair hung in wisps as it had dried after being wet by the rain. It gave her an elfish look, but, with all her uncanny thinness and unexpectedness, there was a fascination about her that baffled Elizabeth even more than did Phenie’s faults, for it seemed to ward off criticism ; and it vexed Elizabeth that she could not be more vexed at this wayward thing.

Phenie never waited for other people’s moods to set the pace. She was quite absorbed in her own guitar-swinging till the air reminded her of another Spanish song ; then she threw herself into a crisp and saucy attitude, and broke into a bolero that ended in a high shrill note, which seemed to fill the room with matadors, señoritas, mantillas, and pomegranates, also with love and treason.

“ Carmen,” said Elizabeth grimly, “ will you please tend to the fire ? ”

But Phenie did not stop her singing. Elizabeth put a fresh stick on the coals. From where she sat she could see that Phenie’s dress was drawing wet hieroglyphics on the waxed floor. The dress was very shabby, — a beggar-skirt, — but worn with picturesque style.

“ I am going to be married,” abruptly announced Phenie, still thrumming on the guitar. “ Yes, I remember now that is what I came in to tell you. I knew there was something I meant to speak of.”

“ And that is why you were so keen to go and see your little great-grandmother who lives in the churchyard and is so like you ! ”

“ Perfectly natural in me. I was wondering how she felt when she was engaged to be married,—before she was the wife of Adoniram Hinton and had earned her little epitaph ! ”

“Don’t tell me, Phenie, that you are going to marry Smith, — the dismal Smith who ought never to have come over here to ruin canvas ! He ought to be back to-day in Vermont, helping his father on the farm. He never will earn enough to buy a bushel of potatoes by art.”

“Smithy? Little Smithy? Oh no! He’s gone, you know, — gone away, disappeared, nobody knows where. Paid all his debts and disappeared, — improvident fellow! ”

“ Do you sleep well nights, Phenie, with all your moral responsibilities ? ”

“ No, I don’t sleep very well. I have nightmares.” This, again, in her grieved and pitying tone. She was busy building up a vast and comfortable nest near the fire, and she did not seem to notice the air of disapprobation that radiated from Elizabeth.

Phenie’s accessories always favored her. That was one reason why it was so hard to attach any ethical obligation to her. Even her atmosphere defied one to attribute responsibilities. Elizabeth was almost the only person who ever tried to, and she failed. She watched her now as she propped up the cushions against the copper brocca. This proving insecure, the fire-screen was tilted back, the cushions were heaped up, and into them sank Phenie, with a contented “ There ! ”

“I suppose, then,” remarked Elizabeth, after a pause, “ that you are going to throw yourself away on that count who has been dangling round wherever you have been this fall. He is, if possible, one degree worse than Smith. Smith was respectable.”

“ No, I could n’t bring myself to marry the count. I tried to ; really I did,” replied Phenie, as if hoping that Elizabeth would condone her failure in view of her efforts.

“ The only other alternative is, then, an old, rich man. You have sold yourself.”

“Never! Elizabeth, I am pained. This is an old friend of my mother’s.”

“ I knew it,” said Elizabeth dejectedly. “ I knew it would be, of course, some one who was shiftless, bad, or rich and old.”

“ An old friend of my mother’s,” went on Phenie undisturbedly. “ I met him years and years ago in America, when mother was living. He came to see us, and he took a great fancy to me. I was only a child then ; besides, he had a wife,” added she, with one of her sudden smiles that always exasperated Elizabeth ; they meant so much or so little, according to the next remark. Phenie’s smile always left one feeling that however it was construed, the opposite would be found to be true.

“ Now his wife is dead, and he wants to marry me,” continued Phenie.

“ Where have you been seeing him ? ”

“ That’s part of the fun of it. I have n’t been seeing much of him. We have mostly corresponded.”

“ Oh! ” groaned Elizabeth.

“We shall be married in January,” Phenie went on, “ here in Florence. He lives in London, but he will go to America to live if I want him to, — or anywhere else, for that matter. I am getting my trousseau ready. I bought a dear, delightful brass kettle to-day,— big and so comfortable-looking.”

Elizabeth laughed in spite of her indignation. “ I suppose you will have towers and domes and frescoes in your trousseau ; they would be so useful in America.”

“ I did buy a Madonna to-day,” said Phenie impressively, raising herself and clasping her knees with her thin, enthusiastic fingers, “a real old cracked Madonna, with the loveliest little Christus you ever saw. I cleaned it off with my own fingers. I worked for hours over it. I rubbed off all the old sticky varnish (Smithy taught me how just before he disappeared, poor dear !), and then I steamed it over an alcohol bath, and the cracks all drew together, and then I varnished it freshly, and now it is my own beautiful Madonna, — all my own ! And I am going to buy a hundred-franc frame for it. I paid — just think, Elizabeth, and don’t scold— I paid five hundred francs for the picture alone. Oh, is n’t it glorious to be rich ! ”

Elizabeth looked at the frayed bottom of Josephine’s dress, and her wholesome common sense revolted against this mothlike creature’s burning its wings in the awful to be.

“ Phenie,” said she, “ either don’t tell me any more of your doings, or else let me advise you. You will ruin yourself. How dare you spend five hundred francs for anything, — anything except actual necessities ? And where are you to get your bread and butter if this thing falls through?”

“ ‘ This thing,’ as you curiously call my engagement, is not going to fall through; and besides, I never did care much for bread and butter ; and so, just for once in my life, I am going to spend every cent I have, or can get hold of, and I am going to spend it for luxuries, and I am going to enjoy it. Now to-morrow,” said she, as she picked up her wet wraps and surveyed them at arm’s length with loathing, “ to-morrow I shall buy myself a fur wrap, long, ample, and exclusive, with a dash of the sumptuous to it. No, Elizabeth, you may save your sermon ; I am going now to be happy and look rick. Later I shall be rich and look happy.”

A week later, Phenie’s vivacious face blossomed above a fur wrap whose collar just revealed her pink ears. She looked both rich and happy.

II.

“ Elizabeth,” said Phenie, a few days after she had announced her engagement, “ would you have dreamed that one could actually buy and have and hold forever, for one’s very own, a great splendid cathedral lamp, that has been burning for nobody knows how many centuries, before some saint ? Well, believe it or not, I ’ve done it, and I am going to try to live up to it, — in spiritual faith and constancy, you know. I shall have it hung right over my dressing-table when I get settled in my new home in America. I mean to put every scrap that I have collected here in Italy in my own room, so that I shall never forget how happy I have been here, — here in the land of joy ! ”

“ When is your fiancé coming ? ”

“Oh, to-morrow, or yesterday, or some time. You see, he was to have come last week, but it fell through, all along o’ some sister of his. Elizabeth, he is rich, actually rich ! It is almost ridiculous, my marrying a rich man.”

“ Quite,” was the short reply. “ Do you love him ? ”

“ Of course I do ! What a question ! Only — well, I do not mind confiding to you, dear, that I am just a little disappointed to find he does n’t seem to care one bit about Madonnas. He says they are all trash and bigotry, and I am afraid he is too old to change. I wrote to him yesterday that he must try to look at Madonnas as purely decorative. I am hoping that that will appeal to him.”

“ Phenie, you are intolerable ! You don’t deserve to be happy. You are too shallow for anything. I wish something could make you serious ! ”

“ Why, Elizabeth ! I thought you, of all people, would look on marriage as serious. Why, my dear, just being engaged has utterly changed me. I have become conventional. I don’t even think of going out shopping without a maid, and you must remember how I used to roam about. The other day when I went to meet Mr. Griffith, I took Adela along, — truly I did.”

“ Meet him ? Meet Mr. Griffith ? When and where have you been meeting him ? ”

“ Why, I meant to tell you that he was to have been here last Friday. He wrote that he would arrive by the eleven-thirty train, — in the morning, you know. We were all ready for him to breakfast with us. Such a pretty salad ! — all green and gold ; I arranged it myself in my old majolica bowl, with lots of flowers and fixings. Then came a telegram saying that he must hurry right through Florence on an earlier train, so as to meet his sister, who had been very ill somewhere in Egypt, and was on her way to Naples. He arranged it for me to meet him at the train; and then he begged me to go on with him as far as that place with the queer name, where they meet the incoming train from Rome, you know. Of course I went. Sister Maggie could n’t go ; I would n’t let her go to the station with me, but I took Adela, and put her in the second-class compartment. And I did have a perfect dream of a time ! Oh, Elizabeth, is n’t joy easy to bear ? And I know I looked well in my fur cloak ! ”

“ How old is Mr. Griffith ? ”

“ Oh, I am sure I don’t know, — some tedious age, I suppose ; there is nothing so tedious as age. We ought to begin at the other end and wind up as babies; I have always thought so.”

“ Some of us do.”

“ Oh, if you mean me — I am old, old, old ! ” Phenie did look a little withered and tired for the moment.

This was on a Sunday afternoon near the end of December. She had dropped in to dine with Elizabeth, as was her wont on Sundays. It was the habit of the “boys,” as they called the American art students, to call for them later in the afternoon and take them for long walks or to the picture-galleries.

“ Miss Josephine looks like a dove today,”remarked the tall Johnson to Elizabeth, as they strolled through the Boboli Gardens.

“ A dove ? ” said Elizabeth questioningly. She was apt to see things in an ethical light, and it was not without an effort that she disassociated looking and being.

“ Yes. You see she has on all the colors, graded from gray to soft fawn, and capped by that iridescent thing round her neck. Her head moves above it just like a dove’s head.”

“ Methinks it is a cat,” said Steinway, who prided himself on being rude.

Elizabeth, who was loyal, resented this. “ I wonder,” said she, “ how any one dares to speak of a woman as if she were a piece of bric-à-brac, a picture, or an animal ? ”

“ Oh, now, Miss Dunning, don’t be too hard. We fellows don’t mean anything, you know. It is only so-called artistic slang.”

“ And really,” joined in Anderson, “ it is curious, Miss Elizabeth, but one does get to looking even at one’s friends as if they were posing. Just see Miss Josephine now, — how she flattens out into a fresco against that white wall, in full sunlight. Why, if I painted her so, the donkeys who write the art criticisms would say I had filched from the old frescoes. But would n’t it make a sensation in the Salon if I could only hit it off! ” Anderson was young.

“ Do you know,” drawled Spellman to Elizabeth, “ when Miss Bromley sings with her guitar, Spanish fashion, I regularly fall deeply in love with — some one else ! ”

“ I wonder who? ” thought Elizabeth. She only said, “ Let us walk faster, please.” That was almost the only time she did not know exactly what she wanted.

Bragdon, “ the Baltimore Oriole,” as he was popularly called, — he was very dashing, and inclined to a bit of flamecolor in his cravat, — was walking with Phenie, and saying impressively: “ I don’t know what I shall do for the dramatic element when you go away from here. It will cost us fellows a heap of money for theatre tickets, to keep us amused then, and it won’t be half so artistic.”

“ You can go to church for nothing,” said the dove, with serenity.

Soon after this Sunday, Maggie, Phenie’s sister, came in for a long talk with Elizabeth. She had been so busy with all the shopping and the making up of Josephine’s wardrobe that she was brimming over with bottled-up emotions. Besides that, nobody who knew Elizabeth ever considered any undertaking fully begun or done without having had it out with her.

“You never in all your life knew any one so utterly generous as Phenie is,” began Maggie ; “ and what do you think she has just done ? She says she will have money enough after her marriage, so she has not only made over to me her half of the farm down in Kennebunk, but she has actually sent over to the savings - bank and drawn out all her money, and has given me five hundred dollars ! She won’t have a cent left after she has paid for all her dresses and for all those queer things she dotes on so much. I tell her she is no Christian, but a perfect heathen in her tastes. She only laughs ; she does nothing but laugh and sing nowadays. Why, Elizabeth, the brass things alone that she has bought would fill a ship, I should think; and they smell so brassy ! Besides that, she has bought a lot of inlaid chairs and tables and things. I really don’t know as I ought to tell you, if she has n’t already ; but you know all about that Italian count who wanted to marry her ? Well, he failed (he was a gambler ; is n’t it awful?), he failed, and then shot himself ; and now Phenie has gone and bought up most of his old furniture at auction or of some dealer. She says that it has a sentiment for her, and that she is so grateful to have had the dance without paying the piper. I never half understand her, and I can’t imagine how we ever came to be born in the same family. But you must come over and see Phenie’s clothes. Every dress is copied from some old picture, and she has no end of old beads and jewelry. I feel as if I were living in a dream. I almost dread to wake up. And to think — in a month it will all be over! ”

“ I should suppose Mr. Griffith would remember that you too are the daughter of his old friend.”

“ Yes,” assented Maggie vaguely; “but it is n’t as if he had seen me.”

“ To be candid with you, Maggie ” (as if, given half a chance, Elizabeth could ever have been anything but candid), " what puzzles me is that Mr. Griffith dared to think of marrying so young a girl as Phenie. And if he wanted to, why did n’t he come down to Florence and get acquainted with her first ? He must be nearly twice as old as she.”

“ Do you know, Elizabeth, it seems queer to me, but he does n’t look so very old. I know he must be ; he can’t be as young as he looks. I’ve been over it again and again in my mind, and he can’t be less than sixty, but he does n’t look thirty-five.”

“ Oh, you’ve seen him, then ! ” Elizabeth had a momentary sense of relief, immediately followed, however, by an uncomfortable feeling that at last Phenie was caught in a fib, for she certainly had said several times that Maggie had not seen Mr. Griffith.

Maggie hurried to say, “No, I have n’t seen him, but Phenie has his photograph on her dressing-table. She puts fresh violets before it every day. His picture does not look old. Phenie is twenty-three, you know, and I am twenty-seven, and mother would have been fifty-seven if she had lived.” (Maggie knew to a day just how old everybody was ; that was her strong point, — almost her only one.) “ Now if mother would have been fifty-seven, he must be older; but he does n’t look anything like it. He is handsome, too.”

A thousand little doubts were assailing Elizabeth, each one so small that it took a whole swarm of them to make a cloud thick enough to be palpable; but the cloud was getting somehow like a gray mist before her mind’s eye.

“ Miss Bromley has an aptitude for her future rôle of great lady,” said Spellman to Elizabeth one day. “ Do you know what she has just done ? She has bought Bragdon’s Arno by Moonlight, and he is so grateful he cannot speak of it without — well, doing what, if he were a girl, we should call crying; and he is the most undemonstrative fellow in the world. He means to stay over here for three more months of study. It will be the making of him.”

“ Good Lord ! ” said Elizabeth under her breath. All at once she had a vision of Phenie as she had appeared that night when she came in wet, nervous, and willful, and announced her engagement to Mr. Griffith, while she twanged on her guitar, her shabby gown dripping with rain ; and now, only a few weeks later, she was buying pictures, playing fairy godmother to Bragdon.

Elizabeth’s face was a study. Spellman answered what he thought he read in it, and said, “ Oh, she’s all right. She is going to marry money, is n’t she ? I don’t mean, of course, marrying for money. Marrying money and marrying for money are very different things.”

“Yes, it’s different from marrying for money,” assented Elizabeth gravely.

All the same, that night she took out her bank-book, and made a long and careful computation. “For,” said she aloud, as good people will who live much alone, and whose imaginations need the reinforcement of words, “ for, as sure as guns, I shall have to use something soon for friendship’s sake. I feel shaky about Phenie. I can’t help it, — I feel very shaky.”

III.

Phenie was ready to be married, — gowns, brass kettles, Madonnas, and all. She looked a trifle worn, but she was in the gayest of spirits, and more full than ever of her vagaries. She was either exasperatingly gentle after doing the most reprehensible things, or else sweetly contrary ; always being of the opposite mood, whatever was expected. She gave teas and lunches at her rooms, where her new artistic belongings created the impression of the fifteenth century having kaleidoscoped with the nineteenth.

Every day she had some new and grotesquely inappropriate possession to exploit, ofttimes bemoaning her inability to buy the little iron Devil that presided over the market-place, — alas that it was not for sale! That alone, she declared, would be worth more to her than all her Madonnas.

Josephine was quite the sensation of Florence at this time, and it agreed wonderfully well with her.

One night Elizabeth was summoned suddenly by a wide-eyed Italian maid, with more emotion than power of speech. She brought a slip of paper from Josephine’s sister Maggie, saying, “ Come at once; Phenie is very ill.” More than this could not be gathered from the maid, whose Neapolitan dialect was beyond the range of Elizabeth’s studies.

Maggie stood shivering by the door when they reached her apartment. She was haggard with distress. “ Mr. Griffith is dead,” said she, " and I think Phenie will die too ! What shall I do ? She had a letter this afternoon from his sister in London. He died suddenly, and — Oh, Elizabeth, this is the awakening ! Phenie is almost crazy. She fainted away when she read the letter. She had been restless and excited all day, as if she felt that something was going to happen ; and she dropped down in a heap on the floor with the letter in her hand. Afterwards she laughed and cried horribly. I was afraid of her. I sent for the doctor, and he could n’t do anything with her till he gave her something to put her to sleep; and even now she starts and calls out. I know she will die ! What shall I do ? ” And poor Maggie laid her head on Elizabeth’s shoulder, and had the first cry that she had found time for since the news had come.

While Elizabeth tried to comfort her, she herself was going through a certain self-chastisement. She was blaming herself for not feeling the grief of the circumstances more sympathetically, more spontaneously. She was sorry enough for the sobbing Maggie, but there was not that whole-souled oneness in her sympathy for the two desolated sisters that she felt there ought to be. “ I wonder,” she thought, “ if I have been orderly and methodical so long that I have left no room for the expansions of pity.” And worse than the distrust of her capacity for sympathy was the black swarm of doubts, which had increased so that they made a cloud in her brain through which Phenie and her dramatic troubles looked farcical and unreal. She seemed to see herself going through some grotesque drama, at the bottom of which there was no reality.

To Maggie, however, there was no unreality, either in Phenie’s illness, called by the doctor a “ nervous collapse,” or in their financial position. The five hundred dollars so generously bestowed upon her by Phenie had long ago melted down to less than a third ; and in the days that followed, the remaining portion melted like the snow on Monte Morello.

Life was very real to Maggie. Phenie’s health mended slowly, and their finances not at all. Doctors’ bills, tradesmen’s bills, and all the little luxuries of sickness sucked their slender stream dry. One new expense, as Phenie recovered, threatened to bring them to utter and irretrievable ruin. Phenie was obliged to be out for hours driving in the Cascine, where, wrapped in her gray rabbits’ fur cloak, with roses tucked in near her pale face, she received the admiring pity of the voluble Italians who had followed in every detail the poor signorina’s drama.

It was now March, and Elizabeth came to a decision. Action followed always immediately on her decisions. She spent several hours in writing a letter. This letter was addressed to Mr. J. C. Griffith. After writing it she inclosed it in another carefully worded letter to her bankers in London, asking them to forward it to Mr. J. C. Griffith, if it were possible to obtain that gentleman’s address ; also asking them, as a favor, to write a letter to him themselves, introducing her, as she was consulting him on a matter of importance, but had not the honor of an acquaintance with him.

She received a letter in reply from her bankers, stating that they had delivered the letter to J. C. Griffith, Esq., who happened to be well known to them, having been for many years a customer of theirs, so that there was no delay in transmitting the letter, with one of introduction as requested.

Then Elizabeth waited ; and while she waited she tided over the affairs of the two sisters in her usual orderly, methodical, and practical manner ; but she did not think it necessary to tell them that she had written to J. C. Griffith, Esq., and that she awaited with deep interest a letter from him. Occasionally she thanked Heaven devoutly that she knew what she wanted, and was practical enough to get it.

Her letter to Mr. Griffith had been a plain and full statement of the affairs of the two Bromley sisters, including all she knew of Phenie’s engagement. She began by asking if the Mr. Griffith she was now addressing was the Mr. J. C. Griffith who had formerly been a friend of Mrs. Bromley’s in America, saying : “ If you are that friend, the following circumstances are of importance to you. Assuming that you are, I will give them to you as I see them, and I hope that you may help me in my efforts to send the two daughters back to America.” She told him that early in the winter Josephine had announced her engagement to a Mr. J. C. Griffith, an old friend of her mother’s, and that several weeks had been passed in preparing for the marriage ; also, that all the fortune of the two girls had been spent. She explained to him that in some adroit manner, either by accident or by design, no one but Josephine had ever seen Mr. Griffith, and the engagement had ostensibly been arranged by letter ; and that this engagement had been suddenly and shockingly broken off by the news of the death of Mr. Griffith, communicated to Josephine by the sister of the man, also by letter. She went on to tell him how ill Josephine had been and still was, and ended by saying : " The whole affair is to me a matter of confusion and, I frankly say, mystery. It is, however, borne in upon me that the Mr. Griffith to whom Josephine was or was supposed to be engaged was not the old friend of her mother’s, and, acting on that impression, I write to put the matter in your hands. If you are that friend, will you aid the daughters on their way to America, and may I let you know when they pass through London ? As to what you may think it is your duty to do in unraveling the mystery that surrounds the use of your name in the tragedy of Josephine’s life, that is a matter outside of my power to suggest. I need not tell you that they do not know of my intercession with you on their behalf. On the receipt of your answer to this, I shall do as circumstances dictate in the matter of making known to them how I came into communication with you.”

One day a letter came to Elizabeth from J. C. Griffith. He avowed himself to be the one who had been honored as the friend of Mrs. Bromley, “ the most beautiful and fascinating woman I ever met or expect to meet.” He said that he remembered Josephine as giving promise to be much like her mother, and that nothing in the world could exceed his delight in putting himself at their (he had first written “ her,” and then substituted “their”) service. He added : “ Miss Josephine inspires me with great interest. In her, evidently, a trace of the mother lives, cven in the aptitude of her feet for somewhat tangled paths. I am proud to be of service to her.”

“ Good gracious ! ” said Elizabeth, “ I 've fixed it now. The old fool will marry Phenie, as sure as my name is Elizabeth Dunning ! ”

And he did marry Phenie Bromley in just three months after he met her in London.

It was a long time before Elizabeth could make herself write to Josephine after receiving an erratic little note from her announcing her happy engagement to Mr. J. C. Griffith, without a single reference to the past, or a single explanation of who this Mr. Griffith was. And when Elizabeth did write, it could hardly be called a congratulatory letter. In fact, it read : —

“ Phenie Bromley, will you tell me whose photograph you had standing on your dressing - table here in Florence, framed in old ivory and silver, before which you put fresh violets every day ? ”

And Phenie answered by return mail:

“ Why, Elizabeth, you dear old thing, that was only a card that I used in my game of solitaire ! Yours,

PHENIE BROMLEY GRIFFITH.”

Madelene Yale Wynne.