Little Miss Severance sat with her hands as cold as ice.

The stage of her coming adventure was beautifully set--the conventional stage for the adventure of a young girl, her mother's drawing-room.

Her mother had the art of setting stages.

The room was not large,--a New York brownstone front in the upper Sixties even though altered as to entrance, and allowed to sprawl backward over yards not originally intended for its use, is not a palace,--but it was a room and not a corridor; you had the comfortable sense of four walls about you when its one small door was once shut.

It was filled, perhaps a little too much filled, with objects which seemed to have nothing in common except beauty; but propinquity, propinquity of older date than the house in which they now were, had given them harmony.