I never could understand how the Woodhouse girls could endure that forlorn old place of theirs.

But then, a woman never does make a really good manager unless she's married." Lois found her aunt in the long parlor, playing Patience.

She was sitting in a straight-backed chair,--for Mrs.Dale scorned the weakness of a rocking-chair,--before a spindle-legged table, covered with green baize and with a cherry-wood rim inlaid with mother-of-pearl and ivory.

On it were thirteen groups of cards, arranged with geometrical exactness at intervals of half an inch.
"Well, Lois," she said, as her niece entered.

"Oh, you have brought the spoons back ?" But she interrupted herself, her eyebrows knitted and her lower lip thrust out, to lift a card slowly, and decide if she should move it.