lor, 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 thorough-bred
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
afterwards 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 Y