Aunt Jane's Nieces

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - Professor De Graf was sorting the mail at the breakfast table. Here's a letter for you Beth said he and tossed it across the cloth to where his daughter sat. The girl raised her eyebrows expressing surprise. It was some-thing unusual for her to receive a letter. She picked up the square envelope between a finger and thumb and carefully read the inscription Miss Elizabeth De Graf Cloverton Ohio. Turning the envelope she found on the reverse flap a curious armorial emblem with the word Elmhurst. Then she glanced at her father her eyes big and somewhat startled in expression. The Professor was deeply engrossed in a letter from Benjamin Lowenstein which declared that a certain note must be paid at maturity. His weak watery blue eyes stared rather blankly from behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. His flat nostrils extended and compressed like those of a frightened horse; and the indecisive mouth was tremulous. At the best the Professor was not an imposing personage. He wore a dressing-gown of soiled quilted silk and linen not too immaculate; but his little sandy moustache and the goatee that decorated his receding chin were both carefully waxed into sharp points - an indication that he possessed at least one vanity.