The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne

me back I'll send for them; I wish you'd remind me. Did Mrs. Binney come? and Lizzie? Oh, that's good. Where are they? Down in the cellar! Oh, did the ext

w, at three o'clock on a beautiful April afternoon, she was almost frantic with fatigue and nervousness. The house had been cleaned thoroughly the day before, rugs shaken, mirrors polished, floors oiled; the grand piano had been closed, and pushed against the wall; the reading-table had been cleared, and wheeled out under the turn of the stairway; the pretty drawing-room and square big entrance hall had been emptied to

score-cards to be scattered about. And in the kitchen-But Mrs. Carew's heart failed at the thought. True, her own two maids were being helped out to-day by Mrs. Binney from the village, a tower of strength in an emergency, and by Lizzie Binney, a worthy daughter of her mother; but

ate glance at the kitchen clock, "it will

d up, and her gingham dress, in the last stage of age and thinness, protected by a new stiff white apron; Celia, Mrs. Carew's cook, was sitting opposite her, d

ng, Celia?" said Mrs.

ullery, so I don't know will I have enough for the salad. They sen

s Mrs. Carew picked up the big mixing

g; and a cherry and a piece of pineapple in every glass. Did Annie find the doilies for the big trays? Yes. I got the bowl down; Annie's going to

ng in the drawer," said Lizzie, "I thought I'd

I may have to play to-night, Celia," she went on, to her own cook, "but you girls can manage everything, can't you? Dinner

nfidently. "We'll clear up here pretty soon, an

m, where the long table had been already set with a shining cloth, and where silver and glass gleamed in the darkness, b

id so. The buttercups, in a great bowl on the table, were already dropping t

mall heel and dropping wearily into a porch rocker. "There must be one thousan

ty house, with its lawn and garden, was almost the last on River Street, and stood on the slope of a hill that commanded al

under their reckless hospitality and unfailing gaiety, were just across the street. On River Street, too, lived dignified, aristocratic old Mrs. Apostleman and nervous, timid Anne Pratt and her brother Walter, whose gloomy, stately old mansion was one of the finest in town. Up at the end of the street were the Carews, and the shabby comfortable home of Dr. and Mrs. Brown, and

ay station, and post-office, the library, and the women's clubh

l and glittering fountain indeed, a hundred drinks could be mixed of which Broadway never even heard. And on Broadway, three thousand miles away, the women who shopped were buying the same boxed powders, the same bottled toilet waters, the same patented soaps and brushes and candies that were to be found here. And in the immense grocery st

with French hats in their smart Paris boxes-there was even a very tiny, very elegant little shop where pa

re sixty years ago there had been but a lonely outpost on a Spanish sheep-ranch, and where thirty years after t

ry of White & Company. The men, and boys, and girls of the settlement all worked in one or another of these places, and the women gossiped in their untidy doorways. Above the Carew house and Doctor Brown's, opposite, River Street came perforce to an end, for it was crossed at this point by an old-fashioned wooden fence of slender, rounded pickets. In the middle of the fence was a wide carriage gate, with a smaller gate for foot passengers at each side, and beyond it the shabby, neglected garden and the tangle of pepper, and eucalyptus, and weeping willow trees that half hid the old Holly mansion. Once this had been the great house of the village, but now it was empty and forlorn. Captain Holly had been dead for five or six years, and the last of the sons and daughters had gone away into the world. The house, furnished just a

em, and a hundred times a year the Pacific fogs came creeping over them long before dawn, and Santa Paloma awakened in an enveloping cloud of soft mist. Here and there the slopes of these hills were checkered with the sharp oblongs and angles of young vineyards, and hidden by the thickening green of peach and apple orchards. A few low, brown dairy ranch-houses were pe

le Mrs. Carew lazily,