Grey, throwing the door open, "I hope you will be perfectly comfortable here. My room is just across the hall and Allison sleeps next to you, so you need not be lonely in the night"

Left to herself Miss Rutherford took off her hat and looked about her. The room was pretty enough. The low, wide window-seat in the bay window, covered with rosebud chintz and provided with plenty of luxurious pillows, was quite charming; but then it had a homemade look, after all, and the girl scorned homemade things. She had not been brought up to love and reverence the home. Her world was society, and how society would laugh over an effect achieved in cheap cottons with such evident lack of professional decorators. Nevertheless, she looked about with curiosity and a growing satisfaction. Since she must be thus cast upon a desert island she was glad that it was no worse, and she shuddered over the thought of the possibilities in that boarding house she had passed. However, she was not a young woman given to much thanksgiving and generally spent her time in bewailing what she did not have rather than in being glad over what she had escaped.

Presently the lack of a maid, who was to her a necessary institution, began to make itself felt. Her aunt had servants she knew, for they had been mentioned occasionally in the long letters she wrote at stated intervals to them. Her father had most emphatically declared against taking a maid with her from New York. This had been one of her greatest grievances. Her father said that her aunt had all the servants that would be necessary to wait upon her, and it was high time she learned to do things for herself. All her tears and protestations had not availed.

But in this house there had been no word of a maid. Mrs. Grey had told her to let her know if there was anything she needed, but had not suggested sending a servant. Of course they must have servants. She would investigate.

She looked about her for signs of a bell, but no bell appeared. She opened the door and listened. There was the distant tinkle of china and silver, as of someone setting a table; there came a tempting whiff of something savory through the hall and distant voices talking low and pleasantly, but there seemed to be no servant anywhere in sight or sound.

Across the hall Mrs. Grey's wide, old-fashioned room seemed to smile peacefully at her and speak of a life she did not understand and into which she had never had a glimpse before. It annoyed her now. She did not care for it. It seemed to demand a depth of earnestness beneath living that was uncomfortable, she knew not why. She went in and slammed her door again and sat down on the bay-window seat, looking out discontentedly across the lawn.

Presently a wagon drove into the yard carrying her two large trunks. She heard voices about the door and then the heavy tread of man bearing a burden. She waited, thinking how she could get hold of a servant.

Allison's light tap on the door soon followed and behind her was the man with a trunk on his shoulder.

"Wal, I kin tell yew that there trunk ain't filled with feathers!" ejaculated the man as he put down the trunk with a thump and looked shrewdly at its owner.

"You ought to bring someone to help you, Mr. Carter," said Allison's fresh, clear voice, with just a tinge of indignation in it as she looked toward the stranger, "that was entirely too much of a lift for you."

Miss Rutherford curled her lip and turned toward the window till the colloquy should be concluded.

"And now," said Mr. Carter, puffing and blowing from the weight of the second trunk which was even worse than the first, "I s'pose you want them there things unstropped. You don't look like you was much more fit to do it yourself than one o' these ere grasshoppers, er a good-sized butterfly."

"Sir!" said Miss Rutherford in freezing astonishment

"I said as how you wa'n't built for unstroppin' trunks," remarked the amiable Carter with his foot against the top of the trunk and his cheeks puffed out in the effort to unfasten a refractory buckle.

"Your remarks are entirely unnecessary," said the haughty young woman, straightening herself to her full height and looking disagreeable in the extreme.

The buckle gave way, and Carter taking his old hat from the floor where it had fallen looked at her slowly and carefully from head to foot, his face growing redder than when he had first put down the trunk.

"No harm meant, I'm sure, miss," he said in deep embarrassment as he shuffled away, mumbling something under his breath as he went downstairs.

'The idea!" said the young woman to herself.