d by the
very sight of the rosy, smiling countenance lifted to her sitting-room
window in passing. She, indeed, pretended to be there in order to get
a good light for her new shell pattern, but she was watching for Ethel,
and Ethel understood the shell-pattern fiction very well. She had heard
something similar often.

"My darling grandmother," she cried, "I thought you would never come
home."

"It wasn't my fault, dear. Miss Hillis and an imbecile young doctor made
me believe I had a cold. I had no cold. I had nothing at all but what
I ought to have. I've been made to take all sorts of things, and do all
sorts of things that I hate to take and hate to do. For ten days I've
been kicking my old heels against bedclothes. Yesterday I took things in
my own hands."

"Never mind, Granny dear, it was all a good discipline."

"Discipline! You impertinent young lady! Discipline for your
grandmother! Discipline, indeed! That one word may cost you a thousand
dollars, miss."

"I don't care if it does, only you must give the thousand dollars to
poor Miss Hillis."

"Poor Miss Hillis has had a most comfortable time with me all summer."

"I know she has, consequently she will feel her comfortless room and
poverty all the more after it. Give her the thousand, Granny. I'm
willing."

"What kind of company have you been keeping, Ethel Rawdon? Who has
taught you to squander dollars by the thousand? Discipline! I think you
are giving me a little now--a thousand dollars a lesson, it seems--no
wonder, after the carryings-on at Rawdon Court."

"Dear grandmother, we had the loveliest time you can imagine. And there
is not, in all the world, such a noble old gentleman as Squire Percival
Rawdon."

"I know all about Percival Rawdon--a proud, careless, extravagant,
loose-at-ends man, dancing and singing and loving as it suited time and
season, taking no thought for the future, and spending with both hands;
hard on women, too, as could be."

"Grandmother, I never saw a more courteous gentleman. He worships women.
He was never tired of talking about you."

"What had he to say about me?"

"That you were the loveliest girl in the county, and that he never could
forget the first time he saw you. He said you were like the vision of an
angel."

"Nonsense! I was just a pretty girl in a book muslin frock and a white
sash, with a rose at my breast. I believe they use book muslin for
linings now, but it did make the sheerest, lightest frocks