wretchedly?" she asked, glancing at the mirror.

"Dreadfully! Is it all watching and grief?"

"Watching and grief," said Lu.

How melancholy her smile was! She would have crazed me in a little
while, if I had minded her.

"Did you care so much for fretful, crabbed Aunt Willoughby?"

"She was very kind to me," Lu replied.

There was an odd air with her that day. She didn't go at once and get
off her travelling-dress, but trifled about in a kind of expectancy, a
little fever going and coming in her cheeks, and turning at any noise.

Will you believe it?--though I know Lu had refused him,--who met her at
the half-way junction, saw about her luggage, and drove home with her,
but Mr. Dudley, and was with us, a half-hour afterward, when Rose came
in? Lu didn't turn at his step, but the little fever in her face
prevented his seeing her as I had done. He shook hands with her and
asked after her health, and shook hands with Mr. Dudley, (who hadn't
been near us during her absence,) and seemed to wish she should feel
that he recognized without pain a connection between herself and that
personage. But when he came back to me, I was perplexed again at that
bewitched look in his face,--as if Lu's presence made him feel that he
was in a dream, I the enchantress of that dream. It did not last long,
though. And soon she saw Mr. Dudley out, and went up-stairs.

When Lu came down to tea, she had my beads in her hand again.

"I went into your room and got them, dear Yone," she said, "because I
have found something to replace the broken bell-wort"; and she showed us
a little amber bee, black and golden. "Not so lovely as the bell-wort,"
she resumed, "and I must pierce it for the thread; but it will fill the
number. Was I not fortunate to find it?"

But when at a flame she heated a long, slender needle to pierce it, the
little winged wonder shivered between her fingers, and under the hot
steel filled the room with the honeyed smell of its dusted substance.

"Never mind," said I again. "It's a shame, though,--it was so much
prettier than the bell-wort! We might have known it was too brittle.
It's just as well, Lu."

The room smelt like a chancel at vespers. Rose sauntered to the window,
and so down the garden, and then home.

"Yes. It cannot be helped," she said, with a smile. "But I really
counted upon seeing it on the string. I'm not lucky at amber. You know
little Asian said it would bring bane to the bearer."

"Dear! dear!