No. 13 Washington Square

No. 13 Washington Square

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Scott
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Title: No. 13 Washington Square
Author: Leroy Scott
Release Date: October 24, 2004 [eBook #13844]
Language: English
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WASHINGTON SQUARE***
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NO. 13 WASHINGTON SQUARE
by
LEROY SCOTT
1914

[Illustration: "I NEVER SUSPECTED I'D END IN SUCH A LITTLE
BLAZE"]

CONTENTS
I. THE GREAT MRS. DE PEYSTER
II. ENTER AN AMIABLE YOUNG GENTLEMAN
III. MISTRESS OF HER HOUSE
IV. A SLIGHT PREDICAMENT
V. THE HONOR OF THE NAME
VI. BEHIND THE BLINDS
VII. NOT IN THE PLAN
VIII. THE HONEYMOONERS
IX. THE FLIGHT
X. PEACE--OF A SORT
XI. THE REVEREND MR. PYECROFT
XII. HOME AGAIN
XIII. THE HAPPY FAMILY
XIV. THE ATTIC ROOM
XV. DOMESTIC SCENES
XVI. THE MAN IN THE CELLULOID COLLAR
XVII. A QUESTION OF IDENTITY
XVIII. THE THIRD FLIGHT
XIX. A PLEASANT HERMITAGE
XX. MATILDA BREAKS IT GENTLY
XXI. THE VEILED LADY
XXII. A FAMILY REUNION
XXIII. MR. PYECROFT TAKES CHARGE

ILLUSTRATIONS
"I NEVER SUSPECTED I'D END IN SUCH A LITTLE BLAZE"
"WHAT'S THAT YOU'RE CARRYING?"
"IT IS REALLY A REMARKABLE LIKENESS"
MATILDA UNLOCKED THE SERVANTS' DOOR
"SAME PAPER--SAME HANDWRITING!"
"SO--SO IT'S I--THAT'S--THAT'S DEAD!"

NO. 13 WASHINGTON SQUARE

CHAPTER I

THE GREAT MRS. DE PEYSTER
It was a raw, ill-humored afternoon, yet too late in the spring for the
ministration of steam heat, so the unseasonable May chill was banished
from Mrs. De Peyster's sitting-room by a wood fire that crackled in the
grate; crackled most decorously, be it added, for Mrs. De Peyster's fire
would no more have forgotten itself and shown a boisterous enthusiasm
than would one of her admirably trained servants. Beside a small steel
safe, whose outer shell of exquisite cabinet-work transformed that
fortress against burglarious desire into an article of furniture that
harmonized with the comfortable elegance of a lady's boudoir, sat Mrs.
De Peyster herself--she was born a De Peyster--carefully transferring
her jewels from the trays of the safe to leathern cases. She looked quite
as Mrs. De Peyster should have looked: with an aura of high dignity
that a sixty-year-old dowager of the first water could not surpass, yet
with a freshness of person that (had it not been for her dignity) might
have made her early forties seem a blossomy thirty-five.
Before the well-bred fire sat a lady whose tears had long since dried
that she had shed when she had bid good-bye to thirty. She
was--begging the lady's pardon--a trifle spare, and a trifle pale, and
though in a manner well enough dressed her clothes had an air of
bewilderment, of general irresolution, as though each article was
uncertain in its mind as to whether it purposed to remain where it had
been put, or casually wander away on blind and timorous adventures.
A dozen years before, Mrs. De Peyster, then in the fifth year of her
widowhood, had graciously undertaken to manage and underwrite the
début of her second cousin (not of the main line, be it said) and had
tried to discharge her duty in the important matter of securing her a
husband. But her efforts had been futile, and to say that Mrs. De
Peyster had not succeeded was to admit that poor Olivetta Harmon was
indeed a failure. She had lacked the fortune to attract the conservative
investor who is looking for a sound business proposition in her he
promises to support; she had lacked the good looks to lure on the lover
who throws himself romantically away upon a penniless pretty face;
and she had not been clever enough to attract the man so irrationally

bold as to set sail upon the sea of matrimony with a woman of brains.
And so, her brief summer at an end, she had receded to those remote
and undiscovered shores on which dwell the poor relations of the Four
Hundred; whereon she had lived respectably, as a lady (for that she
should ever appear a lady was due the position of Mrs. De Peyster),
upon an almost microscopic income; and from which bleak and distant
land of second-cousindom she came in glad and proud obedience to fill
an occasional vacant place at one of Mrs. De Peyster's second-best
dinner parties.
She had arrived but