-faced than have great red cheeks like
a peony bloom. What will he do with the picture afterwards?" Joshua
Snell, through reading the papers so much, knew most things, and he had
said that it would p'r'aps be hung up with a lot of others in a place in
London called an exhibition, where you could pay money and go to see
'em. "If he's right," concluded Mrs White, wringing out the last
surplice, "I do really think as how I must give Lilac a jaunt up to
London, an' we'll go and see it. The last holiday as ever I had was
fifteen years back, an' that was when Jem and me, we went--Why, I do
believe," she said aloud, "here she is back a'ready!"

There was a sound of running feet, which she had heard too often to
mistake, then the click of the latch, and then Lilac herself rushed
through the front room.

"Mother, Mother," she cried, "he won't paint me!"

Mrs White turned sharply round. Lilac was standing just inside the
entrance to the back kitchen, with her bonnet on, and her hands clasped
over her face. To keep her bonnet on a moment after she was in the
house struck her mother at once as something strange and unusual, and
she stared at her for an instant in silence, with her bands held up
dripping and pink from the water.

"Whatever ails you, child?" she said at length. "What made him change
his mind?"

"He said as how I was the wrong one," murmured Lilac under her closed
hands.

"The _wrong_ one!" repeated her mother. "Why, how could he go to say
such a thing? You told him you was Lilac White, I s'pose. There's
ne'er another in the village."

"He didn't seem as if he knew me," said Lilac. "He looked at me very
sharp, and said as how it was no good to paint me now."

"Why ever not? You're just the same as you was."

"I ain't," said Lilac desperately, taking away her hands from her face
and letting them fan at her side. "I ain't the same. I've cut my
hair!"

It was over now. She stood before her mother a disgraced and miserable
Lilac. The black fringe of hair across her forehead, the bonnet pushed
back, the small white face quivering nervously.

But though she knew it would displease her mother, she had very little
idea that she had done the thing of all others most hateful to her. A
fringe was to Mrs White a sort of distinguishing mark of the Greenways
family, and of others like it. Not only was it ugly and unsuitable in
itself, but it was an outward sign of all manner of unworthy qualities
wi