hem, it worked on me like a
bad omen."

"Don't be foolish. Then you saw Gerald, too, before they left?"

"Yes. I could have done without, but she'd have been hurt. So I shook
hands, and managed to wish him joy. He was nice, but, then, Gerald
always is that. I've never for a moment said anything different. He said
he wanted me to feel that I hadn't lost a sister, but acquired a
brother. Just as they were driving off I remembered something, and
called after Nell, 'What about your portrait?' for I couldn't think she
meant to give me that along with the rest. Gerald said before she could
speak, 'Take it away!' And Nell said right off, 'Oh, yes. Keep it,
Hattie; keep it!' That lovely portrait he painted of her! I don't see
how she could bear to part with it. But, of course, now she has him she
can have as many portraits as she wants. Come and tell me what you
think, whether it would be safe to pack it, frame and all, or better to
unframe it, or, better still, to take the canvas off the stretcher and
roll it."

Accordingly, they left the room of the cupids and garlands, traversed
the vasty ball-room where the chandeliers, like two huge ear-rings,
divided up the light into twinkling diamond and rainbow showers, entered
the drawing-room of the dignified sixteenth-century chairs, which from
the first had suffered an undeserved neglect, and passed thence into the
familiar parlor of the multitudinous baubles and the grand piano and the
portrait; performing in the contrary direction the pilgrimage on which,
at a period which seemed so immemorably far as to have become legendary,
Gerald had followed Aurora walking before him with a light.

They stood beneath the portrait, and with the image present to their
minds of painter and sitter hasting on their way to be wed, saw this
equivocal masterpiece with a difference. Not Aurora alone looked forth
from the canvas,--throat of lily, cheek of rose, heaven-blue eyes, smile
and ringlets of immitigable sunniness. Gerald, self-depicted in every
subtle brush-stroke, looked, too.

"It takes sober, solid, careful people to be interesting when they
commit a rashness," thought Leslie. Then, with a little surge of envy in
her well-regulated breast, "To be swept off one's feet," she thought,
"how educative it must be, how enlarging."

But a doubt fell, shadow-like, across her vision of future fortunes. If
a person never found it possible to fall in love with those who fell in
love with her, w