both hands, and
Rosalie could see the tears as they trickled through her fingers and
fell upon her work. She thought it very strange; but she said as she
drew her closely to her and kissed her tenderly, "Never mind, we will
talk about something else. I've been so much among them that I am used
to their poverty now. What do you mean to study Jennie? I hope you will
be in all my classes, although you are a great deal younger than I, I
know, for I was eleven the day before yesterday," and Rosalie tossed her
old head and looked at her companion in a very patronizing way.

"I was ten in April," said Jennie, "and this is October, so you see we
are not very wide apart; but I do not know about my studies--mamma said
that Madame La Blanche would direct them."

"Have you ever studied French?" asked Rosalie. "I am reading 'Corinne'
already, and Hattie Mann, who is two years older than I, has but just
commenced the language."

"I read 'Corinne' with dear mamma just before she died," said Jennie,
"but I should like very much to read it with you again if Madame La
Blanche pleases."

"Is your mother dead, Jennie? and is not that lady she whom you call
mamma?"

"God took my own dear mother and father from me, Rosalie; but before
they left, He sent the kind lady to them who made me her child, and they
were quite willing to go, when they knew I should not be alone in the
world."

"Did you live in a beautiful house when your father and mother were
alive, Jennie, and were there birds and flowers all around it, and had
you a nice little pony that you could call your own, and a dear little
sister with golden curls? That is the way my home is," continued she
without waiting for an answer, "and some vacation I am to invite any one
of the girls that I please to go with me to my mother's, and I know who
it will be, too, don't you, darling Jennie?" and she jumped up, and
putting her needle in her work, she kissed the astonished child again,
and went singing down the stairs as merry as a lark. Jennie sat quietly
in the window, thinking of the contrast between her sometime home in the
city and the one described by her happy school-mate, and she would have
grown very sad over her solitary musings; but a gay laugh in the garden
below diverted her from them, and looking out, she saw Rosalie, with a
garland of leaves around her head, and in her hand a bouquet of fall
flowers, which she was vainly endeavoring to throw up to her new sister.
Her