oppressed her and set to work herself upon a vigorous correspondence and
the carrying forward of a matter her brother had outlined for her.
Sometimes in writing these letters she asked Dorothy to sit beside her
and would frequently look at the girl as if she were studying her
features or her manner. At such time Dolly felt a little awkward and
perplexed, yet always, in some indefinable manner, as if this scrutiny
were for her own good. Then Auntie Lu would laugh and call the girl her
"Inspiration," and write the faster.

Those last weeks on the old Farm were very quiet, uneventful, yet most
happy ones; and the two girls passed much of the time in the cool,
shadowy library, among the fine literature therein collected. For Molly
had no further desire at present for "larks" and began, instead, to find
out how much happiness one may find between the covers of a book.
Dorothy introduced her to Dickens, and thereafter the merry maid needed
no urging to: "Do sit down and read and let me do so!"

* * * * *

One morning in that late summer time, Mrs. Betty Calvert was sitting on
a hotel veranda at the Springs. She was looking very handsome and
queenly, in her white gown, her piled-up, snow-white hair, and her "air
of one who belonged" to an old "aristocracy." A little table was beside
her, heaped with her morning's mail; for here, even as in her old home
at Bellvieu, she surrounded herself with more such reading matter than
she could use. But the letters were duly read and re-read, some of them;
and at last she dropped one to her lap, and remarked to a gentleman near
her:

"Cousin Seth, Lucretia Breckenridge always was a fool!"

"Hard judgment, Cousin Betty. I should have given quite the contrary. I
always thought her a very sweet, sensible, lovable woman."

"Hmm. You see a deal of 'sweetness' in this silly old world. But look
here. What sensible woman would write a letter of twenty pages when one
would do? All to convince me of something I already knew."

"Don't expect me to answer that. Go on and tell me what's 'meat' in so
much 'cocoanut.'"

"She believes--and she takes pages to justify her belief--that she has
traced the parentage of one Dorothy, a foundling! Indeed! Why, Seth,
those people up in that unhappy Nova Scotia--unhappy to be afflicted
with two such foolish visitors--they think themselves detectives fit to
rank with the world's greatest. I thought Schuyler had some sense if