The next day, on taking up her embroidery frame, Miss Boggs found a number of old-fashioned cross-stitches added to her Ken-sington.Prudence, she knew, would never have degraded herself by taking a cross-stitch, and the parlor-maid was above taking such a liberty.Miss Boggs mentioned the incident that night at a dinner given by an ancient friend of the Carews.
"Oh, that's the work of Lydia Carew, with-out a doubt!" cried the hostess."She visits every new family that moves to the house, but she never remains more than a week or two with any one.""It must be that she disapproves of them,"suggested Miss Boggs.
"I think that's it," said the hostess."She doesn't like their china, or their fiction.""I hope she'll disapprove of us," added Miss Prudence.
The hostess belonged to a very old Philadel-phian family, and she shook her head.
"I should say it was a compliment for even the ghost of Miss Lydia Carew to approve of one," she said severely.
The next morning, when the sisters entered their drawing-room there were numerous evi-dences of an occupant during their absence.
The sofa pillows had been rearranged so that the effect of their grouping was less bizarre than that favored by the Western women; a horrid little Buddhist idol with its eyes fixed on its abdomen, had been chastely hidden behind a Dresden shepherdess, as unfit for the scrutiny of polite eyes; and on the table where Miss Prudence did work in water colors, after the fashion of the impressionists, lay a prim and impossible composition representing a moss-rose and a number of heartsease, col-ored with that caution which modest spinster artists instinctively exercise.
"Oh, there's no doubt it's the work of Miss Lydia Carew," said Miss Prudence, contemptu-ously."There's no mistaking the drawing of that rigid little rose.Don't you remember those wreaths and bouquets framed, among the pictures we got when the Carew pictures were sent to us? I gave some of them to an orphan asylum and burned up the rest.""Hush!" cried Miss Boggs, involuntarily.
"If she heard you, it would hurt her feelings terribly.Of course, I mean --" and she blushed."It might hurt her feelings --but how perfectly ridiculous! It's impos-sible!"
Miss Prudence held up the sketch of the moss-rose.
"THAT may be impossible in an artistic sense, but it is a palpable thing.""Bosh!" cried Miss Boggs.
"But," protested Miss Prudence, "how do you explain it?""I don't," said Miss Boggs, and left the room.
That evening the sisters made a point of being in the drawing-room before the dusk came on, and of lighting the gas at the first hint of twilight.They didn't believe in Miss Lydia Carew -- but still they meant to be beforehand with her.They talked with un-wonted vivacity and in a louder tone than was their custom.But as they drank their tea even their utmost verbosity could not make them oblivious to the fact that the perfume of sweet lavender was stealing insidiously through the room.They tacitly refused to recognize this odor and all that it indicated, when sud-denly, with a sharp crash, one of the old Carew tea-cups fell from the tea-table to the floor and was broken.The disaster was fol-lowed by what sounded like a sigh of pain and dismay.
"I didn't suppose Miss Lydia Carew would ever be as awkward as that," cried the younger Miss Boggs, petulantly.
