look so much happier than you used to
do. Oh! I do hope we shall love each other as sisters ought to do. It is
so sweet to have a sister to love."

The exchange of her warm, traveling dress for a loose, light undress,
gave inexpressible relief to Helen, who, reclining on her _own
delightful bed_, began to feel a soft, living glow stealing over the
pallor of her cheek.

"Shall I comb and brush your hair for you?" asked Mittie, sitting down
by the side of the bed, and gathering together the tangled tresses of
hazel brown, that looked dim in contrast with her own shining raven
hair.

"Thank you," said Helen, pressing her hand gratefully in both hers. "You
are so kind. Only smooth Alice's first. If her brother comes, she will
want to see him immediately--and you don't know what a pleasure it is to
arrange her golden ringlets."

"Don't _you_ want to see the young doctor, too, Helen?"

"To be sure I do," replied Helen, with a brightening color, "more than
any one else in the world, I believe. But do they call him the young
doctor, yet?"

"Yes--and will till he is as old as Methuselah, I expect," replied
Mittie, laughing.

"Brother is not more than five or six and twenty, now," cried Alice,
with emphasis.

"Or seven," added Mittie. "Oh! he is sufficiently youthful, I dare say,
but it is amusing to see how that name is fastened upon him. It is
seldom we hear Doctor Hazleton mentioned. He does not look a day older
than when he prescribed for you, Helen, in your yellow flannel
night-gown. He had a look of precocious wisdom then, which becomes him
better now."

Mittie began to think Helen very stupid, to say nothing of the dazzling
Clinton, to whom she had taken particular pains to introduce her, when
she suddenly asked her, "How long that very handsome young gentleman
was going to remain?"

"You think him handsome, then," cried Mittie, making a veil of the
flaxen ringlets of Alice, so that Helen could not see the high color
that suffused her face.

"I think he is the handsomest person I ever saw," replied Helen, just as
if she were speaking of a beautiful picture or statue; "and yet there is
something, I cannot tell what, that I do not exactly like about him."

"You are fastidious," said Mittie, coldly, and the sudden gleam of her
eye reminding her of the Mittie of other days, Helen closed her weary
lips.

Tho next morning, she sprang from her bed light and early as the
sky-lark. All traces of languor, indispos