as she ran
upstairs, her cheeks crimson, her lips quivering, her eyes filled with
tears.

"My dear Kitty, what is the matter?" she said, laying a gently detaining
hand on the girl's arm.

"Nothing--nothing at all," declared Kitty; but she suffered herself to
be drawn into Elizabeth's room, and there, sinking into a low seat by
the fire, she detailed her wrongs. "He hates me; I know he does, and I
hate him! He thinks me a horrid, frivolous girl; and so I am! But he
needn't tell me that he does not want to be a friend of mine!"

"Well, perhaps, you are rather too old to take him for a friend in the
way you used to do," said Elizabeth, smiling a little. "You were a child
then; and you are eighteen now, you know, Kitty. He treats you as a
woman: that is all. It is a compliment."

"Then I don't like his compliments: I hate them!" Kitty asseverated. "I
would rather he let me alone."

"Don't think about him, dear. If he does not want to be friendly with
you, don't try to be friendly with him."

"I won't," said Kitty, in the tone of one who has taken a solemn
resolution. Then she rose, and surveyed herself critically in
Elizabeth's long mirror. "I am sure I looked very nice," she said. "This
pink dress suits me to perfection and the lace is lovely. And then the
silver ornaments! I'm glad I did not wear anything that he gave me, at
any rate. I nearly put on the necklace he sent me when I was seventeen;
I'm glad I did not."

"Dearest Kitty, why should you mind what he thinks?" said Elizabeth,
coming to her side, and looking at the exquisitely-pretty little figure
reflected in the glass, a figure to which her own, draped in black lace,
formed a striking contrast. But she was almost sorry that she had said
the words, for Kitty immediately threw herself on her cousin's shoulder
and burst into tears. The fit of crying did not last long, and Kitty was
unfeignedly ashamed of it: she dried her tears with a very
useless-looking lace handkerchief, laughed at herself hysterically, and
then ran away to her own room, leaving Elizabeth to wish that the sense
and spirit that really existed underneath that butterfly-like exterior
would show itself on the surface a little more distinctly.

But the last thing she dreamed of was that Kitty, with all her little
follies, would outrage Rupert's sense of the proprieties in the way she
did in the course of the following morning.

Rupert was standing alone in the drawing-room, looking out of