Mrs.Carling was occupied with some sort of needlework, and her sister, with a writing pad on her lap, was composing a letter to a friend with whom she carried on a desultory and rather one-sided correspondence.

Presently she yawned slightly, and, putting down her pad, went over to the window and looked out.
"What a day!" she exclaimed.

"It seems to get worse and worse.
Positively you can't see across the street.

It's like a western blizzard." "It is, really," said Mrs.Carling; and then, moved by the current of thought which had been passing in her mind of late, "I fancy we shall spend the evening by ourselves to-night." "That would not be so unusual as to be extraordinary, would it ?" said Mary.
"Wouldn't it ?" suggested Mrs.Carling in a tone that was meant to be slightly quizzical.
"We are by ourselves most evenings, are we not ?" responded her sister, without turning around.

"Why do you particularize to-night ?" "I was thinking," answered Mrs.Carling, bending a little closer over her work, "that even Mr.Lenox would hardly venture out in such a storm unless it were absolutely necessary." "Oh, yes, to be sure, Mr.Lenox; very likely not," was Miss Blake's comment, in a tone of indifferent recollection.
"He comes here very often, almost every night, in fact," remarked Mrs.
Carling, looking up sideways at her sister's back.
"Now that you mention it," said Mary dryly, "I have noticed something of the sort myself." "Do you think he ought to ?" asked her sister, after a moment of silence.
"Why not ?" said the girl, turning to her questioner for the first time.
"And why should I think he should or should not?
Doesn't he come to see Julius, and on Julius's invitation?
I have never asked him--but once," she said, flushing a little as she recalled the occasion and the wording of the invitation.
"Do you think," returned Mrs.Carling, "that his visits are wholly on Julius's account, and that he would come so often if there were no other inducement?
You know," she continued, pressing her point timidly but persistently, "he always stays after we go upstairs if you are at home, and I have noticed that when you are out he always goes before our time for retiring." "I should say," was the rejoinder, "that that was very much the proper thing.