The locomotive whistle, however, awakened the guilty consciousness of three young ladies of the Crammer Institute, who were even then surreptitiously regaling themselves in the bakeshop and confectionery saloon of Mistress Phillips in a by-lane. For even the admirable regulations of the Institute failed to entirely develop the physical and moral natures of its pupils. They conformed to the excellent dietary rules in public, and in private drew upon the luxurious rations of their village caterer. They attended church with exemplary formality, and flirted informally during service with the village beaux. They received the best and most judicious instruction during school hours, and devoured the trashiest novels during recess. The result of which was an aggregation of quite healthy, quite human, and very charming young creatures that reflected infinite credit on the Institute. Even Mistress Phillips, to whom they owed vast sums, exhilarated by the exuberant spirits and youthful freshness of her guests, declared that the sight of “them young things” did her good, and had even been known to shield them by shameless equivocation.

“Four o’clock, girls! and, if we’re not back to prayers by five, we’ll be missed,” said the tallest of these foolish virgins, with an aquiline nose, and certain quiet elan that bespoke the leader, as she rose from her seat. “Have you got the books, Addy?” Addy displayed three dissipated-looking novels under her waterproof. “And the provisions, Carry?” Carry showed a suspicious parcel filling the pocket of her sack. “All right, then. Come, girls, trudge—Charge it,” she added, nodding to her host as they passed toward the door. “I’ll pay you when my quarter’s allowance comes.”

“No, Kate,” interposed Carry, producing her purse, “let me pay; it’s my turn.”

“Never!” said Kate, arching her black brows loftily, “even if you do have rich relatives, and regular remittances from California. Never! Come, girls, forward, march!”

As they opened the door, a gust of wind nearly took them off their feet. Kindhearted Mrs. Phillips was alarmed. “Sakes alive, galls! ye mussn’t go out in sich weather. Better let me send word to the Institoot, and make ye up a nice bed tonight in my parlor.” But the last sentence was lost in a chorus of half-suppressed shrieks as the girls, hand in hand, ran down the steps into the storm, and were at once whirled away.

The short December day, unlit by any sunset glow, was failing fast. It was quite dark already, and the air was thick with driving snow. For some distance their high spirits, youth, and even inexperience kept them bravely up; but, in ambitiously attempting a short cut from the highroad across an open field, their strength gave out, the laugh grew less frequent, and tears began to stand in Carry’s brown eyes. When they reached the road again, they were utterly exhausted. “Let us go back,” said Carry.

“We’d never get across that field again,” said Addy.

“Let’s stop at the first house, then,” said Carry.

“The first house,” said Addy, peering through the gathering darkness, “is Squire Robinson’s.” She darted a mischievous glance at Carry that, even in her discomfort and fear, brought the quick blood to her cheek.

“Oh, yes!” said Kate with gloomy irony, “certainly; stop at the squire’s by all means, and be invited to tea, and be driven home after by your dear friend Mr. Harry, with a formal apology from Mrs. Robinson, and hopes that the young ladies may be excused this time. No!” continued Kate with sudden energy. “That may suit YOU; but I’m going back as I came—by the window, or not at all” Then she pounced suddenly, like a hawk, on Carry, who was betraying a tendency to sit down on a snowbank and whimper, and shook her briskly. “You’ll be going to sleep next. Stay, hold your tongues, all of you—what’s that?”

It was the sound of sleigh bells. Coming down toward them out of the darkness was a sleigh with a single occupant. “Hold down your heads, girls: if it’s anybody that knows us, we’re lost.” But it was not, for a voice strange to their ears, but withal very kindly and pleasant, asked if its owner could be of any help to them. As they turned toward him, they saw it was a man wrapped in a handsome sealskin cloak, wearing a sealskin cap; his face, half-concealed by a muffler of the same material, disclosing only a pair of long mustaches, and two keen dark eyes. “It’s a son of old Santa Claus!” whispered Addy. The girls tittered audibly as they tumbled into the sleigh; they had regained their former spirits. “Where shall I take you?” said the stranger quietly. There was a hurried whispering; and then Kate said boldly, “To the Institute.” They drove silently up the hill, until the long, ascetic building loomed up before them. The stranger reined up suddenly. “You know the way better than I,” he said. “Where do you go in?” “Through the back window,” said Kate with sudden and appalling frankness. “I see!” responded their strange driver quietly and, alighting quickly, removed the bells from the horses. “We can drive as near as you please now,” he added by way of explanation. “He certainly is a son of Santa Claus,” whispered Addy. “Hadn’t we better ask after his father?” “Hush!” said Kate decidedly. “He is an angel, I dare say.” She added with a delicious irrelevance, which was, however, perfectly understood by her feminine auditors, “We are looking like three frights.”

Cautiously skirting the fences, they at last pulled up a few feet from a dark wall. The stranger proceeded to assist them to alight. There was still some light from the reflected snow; and as he handed his fair companions to the ground, each was conscious of undergoing an intense though respectful scrutiny. He assisted them gravely to open the window, and then discreetly retired to the sleigh until the difficult and somewhat discomposing ingress was made. He then walked to the window. “Thank you and good night!” whispered three voices. A single figure still lingered. The stranger leaned over the window sill. “Will you permit me to light my cigar here? It might attract attention if I struck a match outside.” By the upspringing light he saw the figure of Kate very charmingly framed in by the window. The match burnt slowly out in his fingers. Kate smiled mischievously. The astute young woman had detected the pitiable subterfuge. For what else did she stand at the head of her class, and had doting parents paid three years’ tuition?

The storm had passed, and the sun was shining quite cheerily in the eastern recitation room the next morning when Miss Kate, whose seat was nearest the window, placing her hand pathetically upon her heart, affected to fall in bashful and extreme agitation upon the shoulder of Carry, her neighbor. “HE has come,” she gasped in a thrilling whisper. “Who?” asked Carry sympathetically, who never clearly understood when Kate was in earnest. “Who?—Why, the man who rescued us last night! I saw him drive to the door this moment. Don’t speak; I shall be better in a moment—there!” she said, and the shameless hypocrite passed her hand pathetically across her forehead with a tragic air.

“What can he want?” asked Carry, whose curiosity was excited. “I don’t know,” said Kate, suddenly relapsing into gloomy cynicism. “Possibly to put his five daughters to school; perhaps to finish his young wife, and warn her against us.”

“He didn’t look old, and he didn’t seem like a married man,” rejoined Addy thoughtfully.

“That was his art, you poor creature!” returned Kate scornfully. “You can never tell anything of these men, they are so deceitful. Besides, it’s just my fate!”

“Why, Kate,” began Carry, in serious concern.

“Hush! Miss Walker is saying something,” said Kate, laughing.

“The young ladies will please give attention,” said a slow, perfunctory voice. “Miss Carry Tretherick is wanted in the parlor.”

Meantime Mr. Jack Prince, the name given on the card, and various letters and credentials submitted to the Rev. Mr. Crammer, paced the somewhat severe apartment known publicly as the “reception parlor” and privately to the pupils as “purgatory.” His keen eyes had taken in the various rigid details, from the flat steam “radiator,” like an enormous japanned soda cracker, that heated one end of the room to the monumental bust of Dr. Crammer that hopelessly chilled the other; from the Lord’s Prayer, executed by a former writing master in such gratuitous variety of elegant calligraphic trifling as to abate considerably the serious value of the composition, to three views of Genoa from the Institute, which nobody ever recognized, taken on the spot by the drawing teacher; from two illuminated texts of Scripture in an English letter, so gratuitously and hideously remote as to chill all human interest, to a large photograph of the senior class, in which the prettiest girls were Ethiopian in complexion, and sat, apparently, on each other’s heads and shoulders. His fingers had turned listlessly the leaves of school-catalogues, the SERMONS of Dr. Crammer, the POEMS of Henry Kirke White, the LAYS OF THE SANCTUARY and LIVES OF CELEBRATED WOMEN. His fancy, and it was a nervously active one, had gone over the partings and greetings that must have taken place here, and wondered why the apartment had yet caught so little of the flavor of humanity; indeed, I am afraid he had almost forgotten the object of his visit when the door opened, and Carry Tretherick stood before him.

It was one of those faces he had seen the night before, prettier even than it had seemed then; and yet I think he was conscious of some disappointment, without knowing exactly why. Her abundant waving hair was of a guinea-golden tint, her complexion of a peculiar flowerlike delicacy, her brown eyes of the color of seaweed in deep water. It certainly was not her beauty that disappointed him.

Without possessing his sensitiveness to impression, Carry was, on her part, quite as vaguely ill at ease. She saw before her one of those men whom the sex would vaguely generalize as “nice,” that is to say, correct in all the superficial appointments of style, dress, manners, and feature. Yet there was a decidedly unconventional quality about him: he was totally unlike anything or anybody that she could remember; and as the attributes of originality are often as apt to alarm as to attract people, she was not entirely prepossessed in his favor.

“I can hardly hope,” he began pleasantly, “that you remember me. It is eleven years ago, and you were a very little girl. I am afraid I cannot even claim to have enjoyed that familiarity that might exist between a child of six and a young man of twenty-one. I don’t think I was fond of children. But I knew your mother very well. I was editor of the AVALANCHE in Fiddletown when she took you to San Francisco.”

“You mean my stepmother; she wasn’t my mother, you know,” interposed Carry hastily.

Mr. Prince looked at her curiously. “I mean your stepmother,” he said gravely. “I never had the pleasure of meeting your mother.”

“No; MOTHER hasn’t been in California these twelve years.”

There was an intentional emphasizing of the title and of its distinction that began to interest coldly Prince after his first astonishment was past.

“As I come from your stepmother now,” he went on with a slight laugh, “I must ask you to go back for a few moments to that point. After your father’s death, your mother—I mean your stepmother—recognized the fact that your mother, the first Mrs. Tretherick, was legally and morally your guardian and, although much against her inclination and affections, placed you again in her charge.”

“My stepmother married again within a month after father died, and sent me home,” said Carry with great directness, and the faintest toss of her head.

Mr. Prince smiled so sweetly, and apparently so sympathetically, that Carry began to like him. With no other notice of the interruption he went on, “After your stepmother had performed this act of simple justice, she entered into an agreement with your mother to defray the expenses of your education until your eighteenth year, when you were to elect and choose which of the two should thereafter be your guardian, and with whom you would make your home. This agreement, I think, you are already aware of, and, I believe, knew at the time.”

“I was a mere child then,” said Carry.

“Certainly,” said Mr. Prince, with the same smile. “Still the conditions, I think, have never been oppressive to you nor your mother; and the only time they are likely to give you the least uneasiness will be when you come to make up your mind in the choice of your guardian. That will be on your eighteenth birthday—the twentieth, I think, of the present month.”

Carry was silent.

“Pray do not think that I am here to receive your decision, even if it be already made. I only came to inform you that your stepmother, Mrs. Starbottle, will be in town tomorrow, and will pass a few days at the hotel. If it is your wish to see her before you make up your mind, she will be glad to meet you. She does not, however, wish to do anything to influence your judgment.

“Does Mother know she is coming?” said Carry hastily.

“I do not know,” said Prince gravely. “I only know that if you conclude to see Mrs. Starbottle, it will be with your mother’s permission. Mrs. Starbottle will keep sacredly this part of the agreement, made ten years ago. But her health is very poor; and the change and country quiet of a few days may benefit her.” Mr. Prince bent his keen, bright eyes upon the young girl, and almost held his breath until she spoke again.

“Mother’s coming up today or tomorrow,” she said, looking up.

“Ah!” said Mr. Prince with a sweet and languid smile.

“Is Colonel Starbottle here too?” asked Carry, after a pause.

“Colonel Starbottle is dead. Your stepmother is again a widow.”

“Dead!” repeated Carry.

“Yes,” replied Mr. Prince. “Your stepmother has been singularly unfortunate in surviving her affections.”

Carry did not know what he meant, and looked so. Mr. Prince smiled reassuringly.

Presently Carry began to whimper.

Mr. Prince softly stepped beside her chair.

“I am afraid,” he said with a very peculiar light in his eye, and a singular dropping of the corners of his mustache—“I am afraid you are taking this too deeply. It will be some days before you are called upon to make a decision. Let us talk of something else. I hope you caught no cold last evening.”

Carry’s face shone out again in dimples.

“You must have thought us so queer! It was too bad to give you so much trouble.”

“None whatever, I assure you. My sense of propriety,” he added demurely, “which might have been outraged had I been called upon to help three young ladies out of a schoolroom window at night, was deeply gratified at being able to assist them in again.” The doorbell rang loudly, and Mr. Prince rose. “Take your own time, and think well before you make your decision.” But Carry’s ear and attention were given to the sound of voices in the hall. At the same moment, the door was thrown open, and a servant announced, “Mrs. Tretherick and Mr. Robinson.”

The afternoon train had just shrieked out its usual indignant protest at stopping at Genoa at all as Mr. Jack Prince entered the outskirts of the town, and drove toward his hotel. He was wearied and cynical. A drive of a dozen miles through unpicturesque outlying villages, past small economic farmhouses, and hideous villas that violated his fastidious taste, had, I fear, left that gentleman in a captious state of mind. He would have even avoided his taciturn landlord as he drove up to the door; but that functionary waylaid him on the steps. “There’s a lady in the sittin’-room, waitin’ for ye.” Mr. Prince hurried upstairs, and entered the room as Mrs. Starbottle flew toward him.

She had changed sadly in the last ten years. Her figure was wasted to half its size. The beautiful curves of her bust and shoulders were broken or inverted. The once full, rounded arm was shrunken in its sleeve; and the golden hoops that encircled her wan wrists almost slipped from her hands as her long, scant fingers closed convulsively around Jack’s. Her cheekbones were painted that afternoon with the hectic of fever: somewhere in the hollows of those cheeks were buried the dimples of long ago, but their graves were forgotten. Her lustrous eyes were still beautiful, though the orbits were deeper than before. Her mouth was still sweet, although the lips parted more easily over the little teeth, even in breathing, and showed more of them than she was wont to do before. The glory of her blond hair was still left: it was finer, more silken and ethereal, yet it failed even in its plenitude to cover the hollows of the blue-veined temples.

“Clara!” said Jack reproachfully.

“Oh, forgive me, Jack!” she said, falling into a chair, but still clinging to his hand—“forgive me, dear; but I could not wait longer. I should have died, Jack—died before another night. Bear with me a little longer (it will not be long), but let me stay. I may not see her, I know; I shall not speak to her: but it’s so sweet to feel that I am at last near her, that I breathe the same air with my darling. I am better already, Jack, I am indeed. And you have seen her today? How did she look? What did she say? Tell me all, everything, Jack. Was she beautiful? They say she is. Has she grown? Would you have known her again? Will she come, Jack? Perhaps she has been here already; perhaps”—she had risen with tremulous excitement, and was glancing at the door—“perhaps she is here now. Why don’t you speak, Jack? Tell me all.”

The keen eyes that looked down into hers were glistening with an infinite tenderness that none, perhaps, but she would have deemed them capable of. “Clara,” he said gently and cheerily, “try and compose yourself. You are trembling now with the fatigue and excitement of your journey. I have seen Carry; she is well and beautiful. Let that suffice you now.”

His gentle firmness composed and calmed her now, as it had often done before. Stroking her thin hand, he said, after a pause, “Did Carry ever write to you?”

“Twice, thanking me for some presents. They were only schoolgirl letters,” she added, nervously answering the interrogation of his eyes.

“Did she ever know of your own troubles? of your poverty, of the sacrifices you made to pay her bills, of your pawning your clothes and jewels, of your—”

“No, no!” interrupted the woman quickly: “no! How could she? I have no enemy cruel enough to tell her that.”

“But if she—or if Mrs. Tretherick—had heard of it? If Carry thought you were poor, and unable to support her properly, it might influence her decision. Young girls are fond of the position that wealth can give. She may have rich friends, maybe a lover.”

Mrs. Starbottle winced at the last sentence. “But,” she said eagerly, grasping Jack’s hand, “when you found me sick and helpless at Sacramento, when you—God bless you for it, Jack!—offered to help me to the East, you said you knew of something, you had some plan, that would make me and Carry independent.”

“Yes,” said Jack hastily; “but I want you to get strong and well first. And, now that you are calmer, you shall listen to my visit to the school.”

It was then that Mr. Jack Prince proceeded to describe the interview already recorded, with a singular felicity and discretion that shames my own account of that proceeding. Without suppressing a single fact, without omitting a word or detail, he yet managed to throw a poetic veil over that prosaic episode, to invest the heroine with a romantic roseate atmosphere, which, though not perhaps entirely imaginary, still, I fear, exhibited that genius which ten years ago had made the columns of THE FIDDLETOWN AVALANCHE at once fascinating and instructive. It was not until he saw the heightening color, and heard the quick breathing, of his eager listener, that he felt a pang of self-reproach. “God help her and forgive me!” he muttered between his clinched teeth; “but how can I tell her ALL now!”

That night, when Mrs. Starbottle laid her weary head upon her pillow, she tried to picture to herself Carry at the same moment sleeping peacefully in the great schoolhouse on the hill; and it was a rare comfort to this yearning, foolish woman to know that she was so near. But at this moment Carry was sitting on the edge of her bed, half-undressed, pouting her pretty lips and twisting her long, leonine locks between her fingers as Miss Kate Van Corlear—dramatically wrapped in a long white counterpane, her black eyes sparkling, and her thoroughbred nose thrown high in air—stood over her like a wrathful and indignant ghost; for Carry had that evening imparted her woes and her history to Miss Kate, and that young lady had “proved herself no friend” by falling into a state of fiery indignation over Carry’s “ingratitude,” and openly and shamelessly espousing the claims of Mrs. Starbottle. “Why, if the half you tell me is true, your mother and those Robinsons are making of you not only a little coward, but a little snob, miss. Respectability, forsooth! Look you, my family are centuries before the Trethericks; but if my family had ever treated me in this way, and then asked me to turn my back on my best friend, I’d whistle them down the wind;” and here Kate snapped her fingers, bent her black brows, and glared around the room as if in search of a recreant Van Corlear.

“You just talk this way because you have taken a fancy to that Mr. Prince,” said Carry.

In the debasing slang of the period, that had even found its way into the virgin cloisters of the Crammer Institute, Miss Kate, as she afterward expressed it, instantly “went for her.”

First, with a shake of her head, she threw her long black hair over one shoulder, then, dropping one end of the counterpane from the other like a vestal tunic, she stepped before Carry with a purposely exaggerated classic stride. “And what if I have, miss! What if I happen to know a gentleman when I see him! What if I happen to know that among a thousand such traditional, conventional, feeble editions of their grandfathers as Mr. Harry Robinson, you cannot find one original, independent, individualized gentleman like your Prince! Go to bed, miss, and pray to Heaven that he may be YOUR Prince indeed. Ask to have a contrite and grateful heart, and thank the Lord in particular for having sent you such a friend as Kate Van Corlear.” Yet, after an imposing dramatic exit, she reappeared the next moment as a straight white flash, kissed Carry between the brows, and was gone.

The next day was a weary one to Jack Prince. He was convinced in his mind that Carry would not come; yet to keep this consciousness from Mrs. Starbottle, to meet her simple hopefulness with an equal degree of apparent faith, was a hard and difficult task. He would have tried to divert her mind by taking her on a long drive; but she was fearful that Carry might come during her absence; and her strength, he was obliged to admit, had failed greatly. As he looked into her large and awe-inspiring clear eyes, a something he tried to keep from his mind—to put off day by day from contemplation—kept asserting itself directly to his inner consciousness. He began to doubt the expediency and wisdom of his management. He recalled every incident of his interview with Carry, and half-believed that its failure was due to himself. Yet Mrs. Starbottle was very patient and confident; her very confidence shook his faith in his own judgment. When her strength was equal to the exertion, she was propped up in her chair by the window, where she could see the school and the entrance to the hotel. In the intervals she would elaborate pleasant plans for the future, and would sketch a country home. She had taken a strange fancy, as it seemed to Prince, to the present location; but it was notable that the future, always thus outlined, was one of quiet and repose. She believed she would get well soon; in fact, she thought she was now much better than she had been, but it might be long before she should be quite strong again. She would whisper on in this way until Jack would dash madly down into the barroom, order liquors that he did not drink, light cigars that he did not smoke, talk with men that he did not listen to, and behave generally as our stronger sex is apt to do in periods of delicate trials and perplexity.

The day closed with a clouded sky and a bitter, searching wind. With the night fell a few wandering flakes of snow. She was still content and hopeful; and, as Jack wheeled her from the window to the fire, she explained to him how that, as the school term was drawing near its close, Carry was probably kept closely at her lessons during the day, and could only leave the school at night. So she sat up the greater part of the evening, and combed her silken hair, and as far as her strength would allow, made an undress toilet to receive her guest. “We must not frighten the child, Jack,” she said apologetically, and with something of her old coquetry.

It was with a feeling of relief that, at ten o’clock, Jack received a message from the landlord, saying that the doctor would like to see him for a moment downstairs. As Jack entered the grim, dimly lighted parlor, he observed the hooded figure of a woman near the fire. He was about to withdraw again when a voice that he remembered very pleasantly said:

“Oh, it’s all right! I’m the doctor.”

The hood was thrown back, and Prince saw the shining black hair and black, audacious eyes of Kate Van Corlear.

“Don’t ask any questions. I’m the doctor, and there’s my prescription,” and she pointed to the half-frightened, half-sobbing Carry in the corner—“to be taken at once.”

“Then Mrs. Tretherick has given her permission?”

“Not much, if I know the sentiments of that lady,” replied Kate saucily.

“Then how did you get away?” asked Prince gravely.

“BY THE WINDOW.”

When Mr. Prince had left Carry in the arms of her stepmother, he returned to the parlor.

“Well?” demanded Kate.

“She will stay—YOU will, I hope, also—tonight.”

“As I shall not be eighteen, and my own mistress on the twentieth, and as I haven’t a sick stepmother, I won’t.”

“Then you will give me the pleasure of seeing you safely through the window again?”

When Mr. Prince returned an hour later, he found Carry sitting on a low stool at Mrs. Starbottle’s feet. Her head was in her stepmother’s lap, and she had sobbed herself to sleep. Mrs. Starbottle put her finger to her lip. “I told you she would come. God bless you, Jack! and good night.”

The next morning Mrs. Tretherick, indignant, the Rev. Asa Crammer, principal, injured, and Mr. Joel Robinson, Sr., complacently respectable, called upon Mr. Prince. There was a stormy meeting, ending in a demand for Carry. “We certainly cannot admit of this interference,” said Mrs. Tretherick, a fashionably dressed, indistinctive-looking woman. “It is several days before the expiration of our agreement; and we do not feel, under the circumstances, justified in releasing Mrs. Starbottle from its conditions.” “Until the expiration of the school term, we must consider Miss Tretherick as complying entirely with its rules and discipline,” imposed Dr. Crammer. “The whole proceeding is calculated to injure the prospects, and compromise the position, of Miss Tretherick in society,” suggested Mr. Robinson.

In vain Mr. Prince urged the failing condition of Mrs. Starbottle, her absolute freedom from complicity with Carry’s flight, the pardonable and natural instincts of the girl, and his own assurance that they were willing to abide by her decision. And then, with a rising color in his cheek, a dangerous look in his eye, but a singular calmness in his speech, he added:

“One word more. It becomes my duty to inform you of a circumstance which would certainly justify me, as an executor of the late Mr. Tretherick, in fully resisting your demands. A few months after Mr. Tretherick’s death, through the agency of a Chinaman in his employment, it was discovered that he had made a will, which was subsequently found among his papers. The insignificant value of his bequest—mostly land, then quite valueless—prevented his executors from carrying out his wishes, or from even proving the will, or making it otherwise publicly known, until within the last two or three years, when the property had enormously increased in value. The provisions of that bequest are simple, but unmistakable. The property is divided between Carry and her stepmother, with the explicit condition that Mrs. Starbottle shall become her legal guardian, provide for her education, and in all details stand to her IN LOCO PARENTIS.”

“What is the value of this bequest?” asked Mr. Robinson. “I cannot tell exactly, but not far from half a million, I should say,” returned Prince. “Certainly, with this knowledge, as a friend of Miss Tretherick I must say that her conduct is as judicious as it is honorable to her,” responded Mr. Robinson. “I shall not presume to question the wishes, or throw any obstacles in the way of carrying out the intentions, of my dead husband,” added Mrs. Tretherick; and the interview was closed.

When its result was made known to Mrs. Starbottle, she raised Jack’s hand to her feverish lips. “It cannot add to MY happiness now, Jack; but tell me, why did you keep it from her?” Jack smiled, but did not reply.

Within the next week the necessary legal formalities were concluded, and Carry was restored to her stepmother. At Mrs. Starbottle’s request, a small house in the outskirts of the town was procured; and thither they removed to wait the spring, and Mrs. Starbottle’s convalescence. Both came tardily that year.

Yet she was happy and patient. She was fond of watching the budding of the trees beyond her window—a novel sight to her Californian experience—and of asking Carry their names and seasons. Even at this time she projected for that summer, which seemed to her so mysteriously withheld, long walks with Carry through the leafy woods, whose gray, misty ranks she could see along the hilltop. She even thought she could write poetry about them, and recalled the fact as evidence of her gaining strength; and there is, I believe, still treasured by one of the members of this little household a little carol so joyous, so simple, and so innocent that it might have been an echo of the robin that called to her from the window, as perhaps it was.