“For goodness’ sake, wait a moment, Aunt Susan!  You never stop to think what you are about!”

He flew to his bedchamber, and returned in a moment perceptibly changed in his outward appearance, and remarking, snappishly: 

“Hang it, she would have introduced me to this angel in that sky-blue dressing-gown with red-hot lapels!  Women never think, when they get a-going.”

He hastened and stood by the desk, and said eagerly, “Now, Aunty, I am ready,” and fell to smiling and bowing with all the persuasiveness and elegance that were in him.

“Very well.  Miss Rosannah Ethelton, let me introduce to you my favorite nephew, Mr. Alonzo Fitz Clarence.  There!  You are both good people, and I like you; so I am going to trust you together while I attend to a few household affairs.  Sit down, Rosannah; sit down, Alonzo.  Good-by; I sha’n’t be gone long.”

Alonzo had been bowing and smiling all the while, and motioning imaginary young ladies to sit down in imaginary chairs, but now he took a seat himself, mentally saying, “Oh, this is luck!  Let the winds blow now, and the snow drive, and the heavens frown!  Little I care!”

While these young people chat themselves into an acquaintanceship, let us take the liberty of inspecting the sweeter and fairer of the two.  She sat alone, at her graceful ease, in a richly furnished apartment which was manifestly the private parlor of a refined and sensible lady, if signs and symbols may go for anything.  For instance, by a low, comfortable chair stood a dainty, top-heavy workstand, whose summit was a fancifully embroidered shallow basket, with varicolored crewels, and other strings and odds and ends protruding from under the gaping lid and hanging down in negligent profusion.  On the floor lay bright shreds of Turkey red, Prussian blue, and kindred fabrics, bits of ribbon, a spool or two, a pair of scissors, and a roll or so of tinted silken stuffs.  On a luxurious sofa, upholstered with some sort of soft Indian goods wrought in black and gold threads interwebbed with other threads not so pronounced in color, lay a great square of coarse white stuff, upon whose surface a rich bouquet of flowers was growing, under the deft cultivation of the crochet-needle.  The household cat was asleep on this work of art.  In a bay-window stood an easel with an unfinished picture on it, and a palette and brushes on a chair beside it.  There were books everywhere:  Robertson’s Sermons, Tennyson, Moody and Sankey, Hawthorne, Rab and His Friends, cook-books, prayer-books, pattern-books—­and books about all kinds of odious and exasperating pottery, of course.  There was a piano, with a deck-load of music, and more in a tender.  There was a great plenty of pictures on the walls, on the shelves of the mantelpiece, and around generally; where coigns of vantage offered were statuettes, and quaint and pretty gimcracks, and rare and costly specimens of peculiarly devilish china.  The bay-window gave upon a garden that was ablaze with foreign and domestic flowers and flowering shrubs.