coldly spoke Lady Isabel.

"I don't want his company--I am not fond of it," cried Miss Carlyle. "I
would go to Mrs. Jefferson's, but that I should want a new dress."

"That's easily had," said Lady Isabel. "I shall want one myself."

"_You_ want a new dress!" uttered Miss Carlyle. "Why, you have a dozen!"

"I don't know that I could count a dozen in all," returned Lady Isabel,
chafing at the remark, and the continual thwarting put upon her by Miss
Carlyle, which had latterly seemed more than hard to endure. Petty evils
are more difficult to support than great ones, take notice.

Lady Isabel concluded her note, folded, sealed it, and then rang the
bell. As the man left the room with it, she desired that Wilson might be
sent to her.

"Is it this morning, Wilson, that the dressmaker comes to try on Miss
Isabel's dress?" she inquired.

Wilson hesitated and stammered, and glanced from her mistress to Miss
Carlyle. The latter looked up from her work.

"The dressmaker's not coming," spoke she, sharply. "I countermanded the
order for the frock, for Isabel does not require it."

"She does require it," answered Lady Isabel, in perhaps the most
displeased tone she had ever used to Miss Carlyle. "I am a competent
judge of what is necessary for my children."

"She no more requires a new frock than that table requires one, or
that you require the one you are longing for," stoically persisted
Miss Carlyle. "She has got ever so many lying by, and her striped silk,
turned, will make up as handsome as ever."

Wilson backed out of the room and closed the door softly, but her
mistress caught a compassionate look directed toward her. Her heart
seemed bursting with indignation and despair; there seemed to be no side
on which she could turn for refuge. Pitied by her own servants!

She reopened her desk and dashed off a haughty, peremptory note for the
attendance of the dressmaker at East Lynne, commanding its immediate
dispatch.

Miss Corny groaned in her wrath.

"You will be sorry for not listening to me, ma'am, when your husband
shall be brought to poverty. He works like a horse now, and with all his
slaving, can scarcely, I fear, keep expenses down."

Poor Lady Isabel, ever sensitive, began to think they might, with one
another, be spending more than Mr. Carlyle's means would justify; she
knew their expenses were heavy. The same tale had been dinned into her
ears ever since she married him. She gave up in that moment all