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Nevertheless, her father and Will loved her dearly; so did Katy Preston, though Dolly vexed her conscientious soul all the time. Katy was paid, generously paid, for teaching her, and yet she learned nothing; and Katy confessed, with hot tears in her eyes, to Mr. Vane, that her efforts were all useless, that she could do no more. Dolly must be sent to school.

“Never !” thundered Mr. Vane.”Send my rose-bud into a mud-puddle! Katy Preston, what are you thinking about? Besides, I promised—” Here he turned away and choked.”I promised she should never go. Try a little longer, Katy; it’s no matter if she doesn’t learn; what use is it? She’s good as gold, and pretty as a flower. Stuff and nonsense! She sha’n’t learn if she don’t want to; but stay with her, Katy, and try at least another year. Teach her to sew.”

Katy’s green eyes opened with dismay. Had not she heen taught, in open defiance of the Shorter Catechism, that woman’s chief end was to be educated and to work? Had not she been dragged through a course of every thing at the famous Gooseyoke Seminar
y, where even the feathers in the pillows are laid straight every day, and the very pins straightened out of their crooks as evening entertainment? It would have pleased Katy’s correct New England soul to see the lilies of the field tied up to straight sticks and set in parallel rows. The vagrant habits of cats aud chickens distressed her; dust was materialized evil, and dirt the daily embodiment of Satan himself; while she believed, in common with a good many excellent people, that

as firmly as if it were a Bible announcement, and not the dictum of a solemn Puritanic old prig, who made earth so uncomfortable to those about him that it is the merest justice to write him down an ignoramus concerning heaven. But, having freed her conscience, Katy staid on till dear Dolly was actually seventeen. Seventeen! At that age her mother had married; and when Mr. Vane, startled by Dolly’s sudden announcement that it was her birthday to-morrow, began to count up her years as a sort of gauge for the present she always expected him to give her, he looked at his little girl in dumb amazement. Seventeen! There came to him out of the long dead past a vision of his bride; delicate, gentle, lovely, with those same brown eyes, those clouds of bronze hair, those rose-leaf cheeks—but not that baby face. Oh no! Dorothea Vernon had the sad pure outlines of Guido’s Madonnas, the dove-like look of their eyes, the long oval face, and the delicate lips of faint scarlet: hers was a mature beauty in childhood, and on her death-bed even, long years after, its spiritual loveliness shone unimpaired; but Dolly’s was, and would ever be, the visage of a child, with inexpressive glory in the bright eyes and parting lips, such as only cherubs and babies wear. Still, she was seventeen, and he could not buy her a doll or a picture-book. He looked at her again, having paid on her warm and rosy cheeks the just debt of seventeen kisses which she demanded in advance: she was a very pretty creature. She had that instinct for dress which some women own, and her quaint and delicate costumes always possessed a certain picturesque element, whatever was their conformity to fashion. And Dolly was never out of fashion, for her dresses, though ordered and planned by herself, were made by the best of city dress-makers, and the greatest artistein bonnets of Paris kept her tinted photograph and the measure of her head, and crowned her accordingly with creations of genius that made her the envy of all the Basset girls. To-day she was wonderfully lovely: a long dress of soft purple woolen stuff fell about her in graceful folds, its various outlines and borders defined and edged with full-fringed ruches of glittering silk a shade darker; a long bib of delicate old lace covered all the waist down to her wide silken sash, and rose about her throat into a full ruff of ivory frost-work; her hair was tucked away into a gold-thread net, and frills of lace hid her little hands half-way to the dimpled fingers, while the fringed sash ends, floating to the hem of her dress, swayed and glittered with every motion. She was a lovely picture: the delicate shade of misty lilac brought out all the rays and tints of gold in her hair and long curled eyelashes, and the infantile look of her lace garnitures suited her sweet child-face wonderfully. It was one of Dolly’s notions always to wear white to dinner; in the morning colors had their reign—always of the softest woolen fabric, delicate cambric, or pliant foreign silks, thin and lustreless, but wonderful in shades of coloring as only Eastern fabrications are; but at night she always appeared in the dull ivory white of thick embroidered cloth, or pearly silk with jacket of frost-white velvet; or, in summer, in cobweb draperies of filmy lace and muslin, fashioned like the fringed petals of a flower, in whose unfolding bosom she seemed to shine