re cast those features; but that life and fate had been too
hard for her, and blighted their original promise. Eyes and brow were
of the purest cut; the contour of cheek and throat was broad and
sweeping. Even a slight trace of the small-pox here and there, had not
deteriorated from the delicacy of her profile. One breath of
youthfulness, of gladness, of carelessness, and that severe mouth would
have softened into loveliness.

Even now, her countenance completely changed, as her watchful ear at
last discerned the echo of a footstep on the pavement, coming up to the
door, and a suppressed voice, humming a valse tune, as the key was
being turned in the lock.

"At last!" she murmured, as she drew back from the window; "and late
enough;--and what can make him sing? A glass too much, perhaps, and for
all my pains and patience, I shall only have to preach him sober."

She listened to the step upon the stairs, it was steady, elastic,
noiseless. "Not so bad after all," she said, with a sigh of relief,
"but that he should have taken to singing--?"

The door opened, and a fine-grown young fellow of about nineteen came
in, with a kindly salutation.

"How are you, little mother?" he said, taking off his cap, and
smoothing back the tangles of his thick flaxen hair. "Why did you sit
up for me? I told you I should be late. It was our last dancing lesson
for the winter, and they made a sort of ball of it. If some of our
young ladies and gentlemen had not been of such very tender years, we
should have been at it still. But not a few of our partners were
prematurely carried off, by their respective nursery maids;--a fact
they would not have owned for worlds--and so we had to break up without
dancing in the morning. You have been nodding a bit, I hope?"

"Not I, my son," she said, in a quiet tone. "Care keeps mothers awake
at home, when grown-up sons and daughters go racketing to balls and
parties. However I believe I should have done wiser in going to bed,
than in sitting up here with my teapot, waiting for light-footed young
gentlemen who, I perceive, have already quenched their thirst at a less
insipid tap than my domestic teapot."

"You perceive, do you little mother?" he answered gaily, disposing of
his long limbs under the little table as well as their length admitted
of; "and how do you perceive that?"

"This how: you never walked home singing in your life before; and we
cannot attribute any ordinary cause, to an effort of