she, touching a few transferred to
her waist-belt, and beaming up at her new acquaintance.

Kate nodded pleasantly. "Do you like flowers? I bought them in the King's
Road this morning." A few minutes later she burst into her mother's room.

"Where does this _rara avis_ hail from? I never clapped eyes on such a
beauty--Miss Seraphin is not a patch on her!"

"Don't be so noisy, dear--Miss Leigh? Yes I heard she was nice-looking."

"Nice-looking!" echoed Kate, contemptuously. "Just wait till you see her.
She will be focused by every eye-glass in Brighton when she takes the
children out for their constitutional."

"Dear me! I hope she is a proper kind of person."

"She looks rather in the Lady Audley style--and such a complexion! I
could have sworn it was painted if it had not varied so. Now I think of
it," said Kate, with _malice prepense_, "she is not at all unlike the
photographs, of--,"--naming some one of whose existence she had no
business to have been aware.

"It really is too bad of Mrs. Markham not having mentioned this," cried
Mrs. Barrington, as if Bluebell had been convicted of a crime. "It is
most unpleasant having so _voyante_ a person about the children!"

"Oh, what does it matter," said Kate, heedlessly; "you have no grown up
sons. And she seems awfully nice. She has a face with a history in it,
though. I shall try and make her out to-morrow. No one is ever so
innocent as she looks."

Kate's admiration was still further excited next day as she listened to
Bluebell's singing.

"You never heard anything like it, mamma--she could fill Covent Garden;
and she composes too. I wonder if she has ever been on the stage?"

Less appreciative was the judgment of the erudite Mabel, who reported
Miss Leigh unable to continue her arithmetic beyond the decimal fractions
she had attained to with Miss Steele. "In fact," said the child, with
deep contempt, "I don't believe she has ever-gone beyond the rule of
three herself."

Indeed, the exact sciences were not Bluebell's _specialite_, who now
employed many a perplexed hour trying with Sievier's Arithmetic to work
herself up a little ahead of this precocious pupil. Fortunately she was
tolerably strong in history, having gone through a regular course with
the little Markhams; but it was evident, notwithstanding, that Mabel and
Adela pretty accurately gauged her acquirements, and held them
proportionably cheap.

Kate, too, had become somewhat of a tease. I don't