arriage, anyway."

"I am making so much trouble," said Charlotte.

"You precious child!" said Mrs. Anderson; "when I think of you all
alone in that house!"

"It was dreadful," Charlotte said, with a shudder. "I suppose there
was nothing at all to be afraid of, but I imagined all kinds of
things."

"The things people imagine are more to be afraid of than the things
they see, sometimes," Mrs. Anderson said, wisely. "Now, I think
perhaps you had better get up, dear, and you must drink another cup
of coffee. I think there will be just about time enough for you to
drink it and get dressed before the carriage comes."

Mrs. Anderson took the pride in assisting the girl to dress that she
had done in dressing her son when he was a child. She even noticed,
with the tenderest commiseration instead of condemnation, that the
lace on her undergarments was torn, and that there were buttons
missing.

"Poor dear child, she never had any decent training," she said to
herself. She anticipated teaching Charlotte to take care of her
clothes, as she might have done if she had been her own girl baby. "I
guess her clothes won't look like this when I have had her awhile,"
she said to herself, eying furtively some torn lace on the girl's
slender white shoulder.

When they were at last driving through the streets of Banbridge, she
felt unspeakably proud, and also a little defiant.

"I suppose there are plenty of people who will say Randolph is a fool
to marry a girl whose father has done the way hers has," she told
herself, "but I don't care. There isn't a girl in Banbridge to
compare with her. I don't care; they can say what they want to." She
was so excited that she had put on her bonnet, which had a little jet
aigrette on top, awry. After a while Charlotte timidly ventured to
speak of it and straighten it, and the tenderest thrill of delight
came over the older woman at the daughterly attention.

She told Randolph that noon, after she had got home, that she was
really surprised to see how well the poor child, with no training at
all, had kept the house, and she said it, remembering quite
distinctly a white shade of dust in full view on the parlor-table.

"Her dinner was all dried up, of course," she said, "but I thought it
looked as if it might have been quite nice when it was first cooked."

Already Mrs. Anderson was becoming deceptive for the sake of the
girl. She had carried a box of provisions to the house, and they had
stop