These rooms, above-stairs, were extremely numerous, and were painted all over exactly alike, in a yellowish white which had grown sallow with time.

On the third floor there was a sort of arched passage, connecting the two sides of the house, which Isabel and her sisters used in their childhood to call the tunnel and which, though it was short and well lighted, always seemed to the girl to be strange and lonely, especially on winter afternoons.

She had been in the house, at different periods, as a child; in those days her grandmother lived there.

Then there had been an absence of ten years, followed by a return to Albany before her father's death.

Her grandmother, old Mrs.Archer, had exercised, chiefly within the limits of the family, a large hospitality in the early period, and the little girls often spent weeks under her roof--weeks of which Isabel had the happiest memory.