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Their railway carriage had been full when the train left Bologna; but at the first station beyond Milan their only remaining companion a courtly person who ate garlic out of a carpetbag had left his crumb-strewn seat with a bow.

The view from Mrs. Manstey's window was not a striking one, but to her at least it was full of interest and beauty.

"You ought to buy it," said my host; "it's just the place for a solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worth while to own the most romantic house in Brittany.

IN the good days, just after we all left college, Ned Halidon and I used to listen, laughing and smoking, while Paul Ambrose set forth his plans.

"I CAN never," said Mrs. Fetherel, "hear the bell ring without a shudder."

The news of Mrs. Grancy's death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder--one of fate's most irretrievable acts of vandalism.

When I was a young man I thought a great deal of local color. At that time it was still a pigment of recent discovery, and supposed to have a peculiarly stimulating effect on the mental eye.

"You're _so_ artistic," my cousin Eleanor Copt began.

Mrs. Ambrose Dale--forty, slender, still young--sits in her drawing-room at the tea-table. The winter twilight is falling, a lamp has been lit, there is a fire on the hearth, and the room is pleasantly dim and flower-scented.