Miss Bellard's Inspiration. William Dean Howells

      I

      "MY dear, will you please read that letter again?" Mrs. Crombie said, in tones that might . either be those of entreaty for her husband's compliance, or command of his obedience, or appeal to his clearer impression from the confusion which her niece's letter had cast her into. She began in a high, imperative note, and ended in something like an imploring whimper. She had first read the letter herself, and then thrown it across the breakfast table to Crombie; and as he began to read it to himself she now added, "Aloud!"

      "I don't see any use in that," he said. "There's no mystery about it."

      "No mystery, when a girl like Lillias Bellard starts up out of space and asks a thing like that? We might as well sell the place at once. It will be as bad as The Surges before the summer is over; and I did think that if we came and built inland, we could have a little peace of our lives." Crombie trivially thought of saying, " Little pieces of our lives," but he did not, and she went on: "If it's going on like this, the mountains will be as bad as the seashore, and there will be nothing left but Europe. Give me that letter, Archibald!"

      She recovered it from his wonderingly extended left hand, his right being employed in filling up his cup with the exactly proportioned due of hot milk which he poured so as to make a bead on the surface of the coffee.

      "I can't make Lillias out," Mrs. Crombie flamed forth again. "She is a sly girl; or at least I have always considered her so."

      "It isn't a sly letter," Crombie suggested, impartially.

      " No; and that is just it. Anything franker, or bolder, even, I've never seen in my family." Crombie might have felt the emphasis a blow at his own family, but as he had none except the wife before him, he did not suffer it to alienate his sympathy from her. " If it was anybody but my own sister's child, I should call it brazen. It's a liberty, yes, a liberty, even if I am her aunt. She had no right to presume upon our relationship. If the Mellays are not able to receive her now, she might go somewhere else."

      "Where?"

      "Anywhere!"

      " I don't see where. Her people are abroad, and the Mellays' telegram postponing her a week, seems to have caught her at the end of her stipulated stay with the Franklings; and she can't go to a hotel alone."

      " I don't see why she can't, with these advanced ideas of hers."

      " Because the hotel men are not as advanced in their ideas, and won't receive a pretty young girl if she presents herself with no escort but her youth and beauty. She might as well be a Hebrew or an Ethiopian."

      "Well, it's a shame! There ought to be a law to make them."

      " Oh, I dare say there is one now," Crombie easily assented. " But come, Hester! This isn't going to kill you. A niece for a week is no such mortal matter. One voluntary, or involuntary, guest doesn't imply a succession of house-parties."

      "No, but it is the disappointment! My family, at least, know that we sold The Surges because I was completely worn out with people, and that we came up here into this by-gone hollow of the hills, on the wrong side of the Saco, and built a tumble-down old farm-house over so as to be alone in it."

      "Then you oughtn't to have built the old farm-house over so nicely. Lillias will go away, and tell everybody that you've got electric lights, and hot and cold water, and a furnace, and all the modem conveniences, and the most delightful rambling camp, with ten or twenty bedrooms, and open fires for cold days in everyone. She will say that it isn't dull here a bit; that there's a hotel full of delightful people just across the Saco, which you get to by private ferry, and hops every night, with a young man to every ten girls, and picnics all the time, and lots of easy mountain-climbing."

      "Yes, that is the worst of it. Very well, I shall telegraph her not to come, I don't care what happens. I shall say, ' Very sorry. Uncle sick; not dangerously; but all taken up with him.' That's just ten words."

      "Twelve; and not one true. Besides, where will you telegraph her? She's started. She left Kansas City yesterday."

      "Nonsense!"

      "All the same, that's what's happened."

      "Very well, then, I know what I shall do. I shall engage a room for her at The Saco Shore, if it's full of such delightful people — "

      "Hold on, my dear! That was merely my forecast of her language."

      "No matter! And you can meet her at the station and tell her what I've done, and take her there. I am not going to be scooped up, even if she -is my niece. And so Lillias Bellard will find out."

      Mrs. Crombie gathered the offending letter and its envelope violently together, and started from the table as if to go at once and carry out her declared purpose. But she really went up-stairs to decide which of the bedrooms she should give the girl. She began with the worst and ended with the best, which looked eastward in that particular crook of the river towards the Presidential range, and, if you poked your head out, commanded a glimpse of the almost eternal snows of Mount Washington where a drift of the belated winter was glimmering, now at the end of July, in a fold of the pachydermal slope. She had always to play some such comedy with herself before she could reconcile herself to the inevitable; and her husband was content to have her do so, as long as her drama did not involve his complexity with