Mrs. Conway plunged at once into the subject of amusements for the day.
"Let us see--there is Mrs. R's reception at two--we musn't fail them. You will see the _creme de la creme_ there, my dear. When we get away we will have a drive over to the little city of Alexandria; at six, dinner; at eight, the opera; at twelve, you and Bruce shall have an hour for the German at Mrs. Morton's ball, and then--well, home again."
"Quite an attractive programme," smiled her companion, from the depths of the "sleepy hollow."
Mrs. Conway smiled musingly, as she fixed her dark eyes on the pattern of autumn-tinted leaves that trailed over the velvet carpet.
"Yes," she said, with the indifference of one who is used to it all, "it is last season over again; it is all very charming to one unaccustomed to the round. Poor Gracie was here last winter--these, by the by, were her rooms then, the handsomest suite in the hotel--we went everywhere together. She enjoyed it all so much."
A look of interest warmed the listless gaze of Lulu. The pet curiosity of her soul was Grace Winans, heightened, perhaps, by an indefinable jealousy that went far back into the past, when Grace Grey's violet-pansy eyes had been the stars of Bruce Conway's adoration. She said, regretfully:
"Is it not a wonder that I have never seen Mrs. Winans? And there is no one I would like so much to see. Is she so very beautiful?"
"'Perfectly beautiful, faultily faultless,'" was Mrs. Conway's warmly accorded praise, "and as lovely in mind as in person. She inherits both qualities, I believe, from her mother, who was, I have heard, the most amiable and beautiful woman in Memphis to the day of her death."
"Ah! Is Mrs. Winans not a Virginian, then?"
"No, only by adoption. Her father was a slave-holder before the war--one of the out and out aristocrats of Memphis. He was a colonel in the Confederate army, and killed at the head of his regiment during the first of the war. He was a very noble young fellow, I believe, and devoted to his wife and little daughter. The wife died broken-hearted at his loss, and left this little Grace to the care of relatives, who placed her in a boarding-school, where she remained until the close of the war freed the slaves her father left her, and she was penniless. I advertised about this time for a companion; she answered, and I engaged her. She has been in Virginia ever since. She was just sixteen when she came to me--a charming child--she is about twenty-one now."