chool, and when a girl--'

'When?'

'When she marries--or when she finds out what trouble is,' said Flora.

'Is that all you can hold out to my poor Daisy?'

'Well, it is the way of the world. There is just now a reaction from
sentiment, and it is the less feminine variety. The softness will come
when there is a call for it. Never mind when the foundation is safe.'

'If I could only see that child heartily admiring and looking up! I
don't mean love--there used to be a higher, nobler reverence!'

'Such as you and Norman used to bestow on Shakespeare and Scott,
and--the vision of Cocksmoor.'

'Not only _used_,' said Ethel.

'Yes, it is your soft side,' said Flora; 'it is what answers the
purpose of sentiment in people like you. It is what I should have
thought living with you would have put into any girl; but Gertrude has
a satirical side, and she follows the age.'

'I wish you would tell her so--it is what she especially wants not to
do! But the spirit of opposition is not the thing to cause tenderness.'

'No, you must wait for something to bring it out. She is very kind to
my poor little Margaret, and I won't ask how she talks _of_ her.'

'Tenderly; oh yes, that she always would do.'

'There, then, Ethel, if she can talk tenderly of Margaret, there can't
be much amiss at the root.'

'No; and you don't overwhelm the naughty girl with baby talk.'

'Like our happy, proud young mothers,' sighed Flora; and then letting
herself out--'but indeed, Ethel, Margaret is very much improved. She
has really begun to wish to be good. I think she is struggling with
herself.'

'Something to love tenderly, something to reverence highly.' So
meditated Ethel, as she watched her sunny-haired, open-faced Daisy, so
unconquerably gay and joyous that she gave the impression of sunshine
without shade. There are stages of youth that are in themselves
unpleasing, and yet that are nobody's fault, nay, which may have within
them seeds of strength. Tom's satire had fostered Daisy's too
congenial spirit, and he reaped the consequence in the want of repose
and sympathy that were driving him from home, and shutting him up
within himself. Would he ever forgive that flippant saying, which
Ethel had recollected with shame ever since--shame more for herself
than for the child, who probably had forgotten, long ago, her 'shaft at
random sent'?

Then Ethel would wonder whether, after all, her discontent with
Gertrude's speeches