moment after, she was conscious of her blunder. She saw Georgie
dabbling her fingers in her bowl. She saw Gertrude with difficulty
keeping back a smile which would flicker in her eyes, though her lips
were rigidly grave. Little Marian giggled outright, and then relapsed
into a frightened solemnity. Candace felt utterly miserable. She looked
toward Mrs. Gray apprehensively, but that lady only gave her an
encouraging smile. Mr. Gray put a bunch of hot-house grapes on her
plate. She ate them without the least idea of their flavor. With the
last grape a hot tear splashed down; and the moment Mrs. Gray moved,
Candace fled upstairs to her own room, where she broke down into a fit
of homesick crying.

How she longed for the old customary home among the hills, where nobody
minded what she did, or how she ate, or "had any manners in particular,"
as she phrased it to her own mind, or thought her ignorant or awkward.
And yet, on sober second thought, did she really wish so much to go
back? Was it not better to stay on where she was, and learn to be
graceful and low-spoken and at ease always, like her cousin Kate, if she
could, even if she had to undergo some mortification in the process?
Candace was not sure.

She had stopped crying, and was cooling her eyes with a wet towel when
she heard a little tap at the door. It was Mrs. Gray herself.

"Where are you, Cannie?" she said, looking about the room with her
short-sighted eyes. "You are so dark here that I cannot see you."

"I'm here by the washstand," faltered Candace; and then, to her dismay,
she began to cry again. She tried to subdue it; but a little sob, which
all her efforts could not stifle, fell upon her cousin's observant ear.

"My dear child, you are crying," she exclaimed; and in another minute
Candace, she scarcely knew how, was in Mrs. Gray's arms, they were
sitting on the sofa together, and she was finishing her cry with her
head on the kindest of shoulders and an unexpected feeling of comfort at
her heart. Anything so soft and tender as Cousin Kate's arms she had
never known before; there was a perfume of motherliness about them which
to a motherless girl was wholly irresistible. Gertrude declared that
mamma always stroked people's trouble away with those hands of hers, and
that they looked just like the hands of the Virgin in Holbein's Madonna,
as if they could mother the whole world.

"Now, tell me, Cannie, tell me, dear child," said Mrs. Gray, when the
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