anxious oversight, or seemed in the least to miss
it. As much as her meek nature would allow, she arrogated to herself
the privileges and prerogatives of an elder sister, and if it had been
possible to make Lottie ever feel like a chit, there were moments when
Ellen's behavior would have made her feel like a chit. It was not till
after their return to Tuskingum that Lottie took her true place in
relation to the affair, and in the preparations for the wedding, which
she appointed to be in the First Universalist Church, overruling both
her mother's and sister's preferences for a home wedding, that Lottie
rose in due authority. Mrs. Kenton had not ceased to feel quelled
whenever her younger daughter called her mother instead of momma, and
Ellen seemed not really to care. She submitted the matter to Breckon,
who said, "Oh yes, if Lottie wishes," and he laughed when Ellen
confessed, "Well, I said we would."

With the lifting of his great anxiety, he had got back to that lightness
which was most like him, and he could not always conceal from Lottie
herself that he regarded her as a joke. She did not mind it, she said,
from such a mere sop as, in the vast content of his love, he was.

This was some months after Lottie had got at Scheveningen from Mr.
Plumpton that letter which decided her that she had no use for him.
There came the same day, and by the same post with it, a letter from one
of her young men in Tuskingum, who had faithfully written to her all
the winter before, and had not intermitted his letters after she went
abroad. To Kenton he had always seemed too wise if not too good for
Lottie, but Mrs. Kenton, who had her own doubts of Lottie, would not
allow this when it came to the question, and said, woundedly, that she
did not see why Lottie was not fully his equal in every way.

"Well," the judge suggested, "she isn't the first young lawyer at the
Tuskingum bar."

"Well, I wouldn't wish her to be," said Mrs. Kenton, who did not often
make jokes.

"Well, I don't know that I would," her husband assented, and he added,
"Pretty good, Sarah."

"Lottie," her mother summed up, "is practical, and she is very neat. She
won't let Mr. Elroy go around looking so slovenly. I hope she will make
him have his hair cut, and not look as if it were bitten off. And I
don't believe he's had his boots blacked since--"

"He was born," the judge proposed, and she assented.

"Yes. She is very saving, and he is wasteful. It will be