At the street door of this room somebody has just knocked.  Aurore has risen from her seat.  The other still sits on a low chair with her hands and sewing dropped into her lap, looking up steadfastly into her mother’s face with a mingled expression of fondness and dismayed expectation.  Aurore hesitates beside her chair, desirous of resuming her seat, even lifts her sewing from it; but tarries a moment, her alert suspense showing in her eyes.  Her daughter still looks up into them.  It is not strange that the dwellers round about dispute as to which is the fairer, nor that in the six months during which the two have occupied Number 19 the neighbors have reached no conclusion on this subject.  If some young enthusiast compares the daughter—­in her eighteenth year—­to a bursting blush rosebud full of promise, some older one immediately retorts that the other—­in her thirty-fifth—­is the red, red, full-blown, faultless joy of the garden.  If one says the maiden has the dew of youth,—­“But!” cry two or three mothers in a breath, “that other one, child, will never grow old.  With her it will always be morning.  That woman is going to last forever; ha-a-a-a!—­even longer!”

There was one direction in which the widow evidently had the advantage; you could see from the street or the opposite windows that she was a wise householder.  On the day they moved into Number 19 she had been seen to enter in advance of all her other movables, carrying into the empty house a new broom, a looking-glass, and a silver coin.  Every morning since, a little watching would have discovered her at the hour of sunrise sprinkling water from her side casement, and her opposite neighbors often had occasion to notice that, sitting at her sewing by the front window, she never pricked her finger but she quickly ran it up behind her ear, and then went on with her work.  Would anybody but Joseph Frowenfeld ever have lived in and moved away from the two-story brick next them on the right and not have known of the existence of such a marvel?

“Ha!” they said, “she knows how to keep off bad luck, that Madame yonder.  And the younger one seems not to like it.  Girls think themselves so smart these days.”

Ah, there was the knock again, right there on the street-door, as loud as if it had been given with a joint of sugar-cane!

The daughter’s hand, which had just resumed the needle, stood still in mid-course with the white thread half-drawn.  Aurore tiptoed slowly over the carpeted floor.  There came a shuffling sound, and the corner of a folded white paper commenced appearing and disappearing under the door.  She mounted a chair and peeped through that odd little jalousie which formerly was in almost all New Orleans street-doors; but the missive had meantime found its way across the sill, and she saw only the unpicturesque back of a departing errand-boy.  But that was well.  She had a pride, to maintain which—­and a poverty, to conceal which—­she felt to be necessary to her self-respect; and this made her of necessity a trifle unsocial in her own castle.  Do you suppose she was going to put on the face of having been born or married to this degraded condition of things?