THE GREAT MRS.

DE PEYSTER It was a raw, ill-humored afternoon, yet too late in the spring for the ministration of steam heat, so the unseasonable May chill was banished from Mrs.De Peyster's sitting-room by a wood fire that crackled in the grate; crackled most decorously, be it added, for Mrs.De Peyster's fire would no more have forgotten itself and shown a boisterous enthusiasm than would one of her admirably trained servants.

Beside a small steel safe, whose outer shell of exquisite cabinet-work transformed that fortress against burglarious desire into an article of furniture that harmonized with the comfortable elegance of a lady's boudoir, sat Mrs.De Peyster herself--she was born a De Peyster--carefully transferring her jewels from the trays of the safe to leathern cases.

She looked quite as Mrs.De Peyster should have looked: with an aura of high dignity that a sixty-year-old dowager of the first water could not surpass, yet with a freshness of person that (had it not been for her dignity) might have made her early forties seem a blossomy thirty-five.
Before the well-bred fire sat a lady whose tears had long since dried that she had shed when she had bid good-bye to thirty.

She was--begging the lady's pardon--a trifle spare, and a trifle pale, and though in a manner well enough dressed her clothes had an air of bewilderment, of general irresolution, as though each article was uncertain in its mind as to whether it purposed to remain where it had been put, or casually wander away on blind and timorous adventures.
A dozen years before, Mrs.De Peyster, then in the fifth year of her widowhood, had graciously undertaken to manage and underwrite the debut of her second cousin (not of the main line, be it said) and had tried to discharge her duty in the important matter of securing her a husband.