esires to tell its troubles and be comforted.

CHAPTER IX.

That evening Mrs. Rexford and Sophia had been sitting sewing, as they
often did, under a tree near the house. Sophia had mused and stitched.
Then there came a time when her hands fell idle, and she looked off at
the scene before her. It was the hour when the sun has set, and the
light is not less than daylight but mellower. She observed with pleasure
how high the hops had grown that she had planted against the gables of
the house and dairies. On this side the house there was no yard, only
the big hay-fields from which the hay had been taken a month before; in
them were trees here and there, and beyond she saw the running river.
She had seen it all every day that summer, yet--

"I think I never saw the place look so nice," she said to her
step-mother.

Dottie came walking unsteadily over the thick grass. She had found an
ox-daisy and a four-o'clock.

"Here! take my pretties," she said imperiously.

Sophia took them.

"They's to be blowed," said Dottie, not yet distinguishing duly the
different uses of flowers or of words.

Sophia obediently blew, and the down of the four-o'clock was scattered
into space; but the daisy, impervious to the blast, remained in the
slender hand that held it. Dottie looked at it with indignation.

"Blow again!" was her mandate, and Sophia, to please her, plucked the
white petals one by one, so that they might be scattered. It was not
wonderful that, as she did so, the foolish old charm of her school-days
should say itself over in her mind, and the lot fell upon "He loves me."
"Who, I wonder?" thought Sophia, lightly fanciful; and she did not care
to think of the wealthy suitor she had cast aside. Her mind glanced to
Robert Trenholme. "No," she thought, "he loves me not." She meditated on
him a little. Such thoughts, however transient, in a woman of
twenty-eight, are different from the same thoughts when they come to her
at eighteen. If she be good, they are deeper, as the river is deeper
than the rivulet; better, as the poem of the poet is better than the
songs of his youth. Then for some reason--the mischief of idleness,
perhaps--Sophia thought of Trenholme's young brother--how he had looked
when he spoke to her over the fence. She rose to move away from such
silly thoughts.

Dottie possessed herself of two fingers and pulled hard toward the
river. Dearly did she love the river-side, and mamma, who was very
cruel,