ver again, this tiresome,
useless life; it wears me out, and I mean to change it. You know we
may do just as we please; neither papa nor mamma will care. I shall stay
at home."

"But what will people say?" I put in, feebly.

Alice's eyes flashed. "You know, Kate, I don't care for 'people,' as
you call them. I only know that I am utterly weary of this petty
visiting and gossiping, this round of parties, concerts, and lectures,
where we meet the same faces. There is no harm in it that I know of,
but it is simply so stupid. If we met new people, it would be
something; but the same girls, the same beaux."

"And George W. and Henry B., what will they do for partners to-night?
what will become of them?"

Alice put up her lip. "They will console themselves with Laura C. and
those Kentucky girls from Louisville. For my part, I shall put on my
walking-dress, and go over the river to spend the evening with Uncle
John, and, what is more, I shall ask mamma to let me stay two or three
days." And, suiting the action to the word, she began to dress
hurriedly.

"You will surely never go without me, Alice?"

"You will never stay behind, if I do go, Kate," said she, looking back
at me laughingly. "But make haste, I shall gain mamma over in five
minutes; and we must be quick, if we are to reach Uncle John's before
tea-time."

Uncle John,--even now that long years have passed, so long that it
seems to me as if I had gone into another state of existence, as if I
were not the same person as in those times,--even now the thought of
him makes my heart beat quick and the blood thrill more rapidly
through my veins. He was the delight of my childhood; far better, he
was the comfort and support of my after years. Even as a child, I
knew, knew by some intuitive perception, that Uncle John was not
happy. How soon I learned that he was a disappointed man I cannot
tell; but long before I grew up into womanhood I was conscious that he
had made some mistake in life, that some cloud hung over him. I never
asked, I never talked on the subject, even to Alice; there was always
an understanding between us that we should be silent about that which
each of us felt with all the certainty of knowledge.

But if Uncle John was unhappy himself, who was there that he did not
make happy? No one who came near him,--from his nieces whom he petted
and spoiled, down to the little negroes who rolled, unrebuked, over
the grass before his window in summer, or wok