all! He looked at her in some surprise, but watched her
closely and saw that she did not do this by chance, but that she
carefully avoided the columns containing the news from the army.
Directly Bell entered the room, and _she_ began, at his request, to read
the war news. Then Marion left the room, with an apology, as she had
done the day before.

When John returned, his brother related the incident to him. In return
John informed him of her words on the first night of their meeting, and
the two agreed that she had an unaccountable antipathy to everything
connected with the war, and that nothing more should be said to her on
the subject.

"What if she should be a little secesh?" asked Richard, very much at
random.

"She?" said John. "The granddaughter of that man? Not a bit of it! She
is a little of an oddity, and a very _pretty_ little oddity--don't you
think so, Richard?" and so the conversation dropped.

The young girl had evidently had a fine musical education. She played
very sweetly, though only upon request. Once she sang an English ballad,
upon still more urgent request, but she seemed to do so with such
unwillingness that she was not pressed again. Her voice, as shown on
that occasion, was mournfully sweet and pure, and highly cultivated. She
spoke French with singular facility and unusual correctness for an
American. Bell and the brothers hoped that when the novelty of her
position had worn away, she would more fully enter into their tastes and
habits, and become less impracticable, if not happier.

A very neat little chamber on the second floor, which adjoined Bell's
and had been standing empty except when occupied by chance visitors, was
arranged for the young girl as soon as she entered the household, and
she took possession of it with apparent satisfaction. And what a little
"box" she made of it at once. The very next day she went into the
street, without any consultation with Bell, and made purchases of not
less than a hundred dollars worth of pictures and articles of _vertu_,
to ornament it. It was not difficult to see, at once, that though she
might be indolently content without the surroundings of luxury, yet it
was only _with_ them, and with them in somewhat aristocratic profusion,
that she could be spiritedly happy. When she had added her purchases to
the comforts and even luxuries already in her chamber, she ran into
Bell's room with something approaching to excitement upon her face, and
call