express wagon which had
brought them from the railway station, and under the direction of Wesley
Watts Mather, the dusky porter, janitor and general handy man, were being
conveyed to the various rooms in which they and their owners would bide
for the ensuing eight months, for Leslie Manor did not open its doors to
its pupils until October first and closed them the first week in June.
This was at the option of Miss Woodhull, the principal, who went abroad
each June taking with her several of her pupils for a European tour, to
return with her enlightened, edified charges in September. It was a
pleasurable as well as a profitable arrangement for the lady who was
absolutely free of encumbrance and could do as she chose.

Leslie Manor had once been the home of a widely known southern family
whose fortunes had sadly decreased during the war and completely
evaporated after it. For several years the place was entirely deserted
and neglected, then Miss Woodhull, recently graduated from a New England
college, and fairly bristling with degrees, for which she had exchanged
the freshness, sweetness and spontaneity of youth and health, was ordered
to spend at least a year in the south in the doubtful hope of recovering
the youth and health.

Just where to find these valuable assets was the hardest question to
answer. Her only relatives were an elderly maiden aunt and an irascible
old uncle whose time was too filled with providing the wherewithal to
maintain a very elaborate establishment for a very vain wife and three
frivolous daughters, to leave any left over in which to think of the
welfare of his only sister's child. Moreover, his wife and daughters
could not endure her, and, truth to tell, they had about as much affinity
for one another as have oil and water. They might flow side by side
forever but never mingle.

The maiden aunt was her father's sister, an austere dignified old party
who resided most exclusively in her ancestral home on Beacon Street, and
lived in a rut worn _ages_ deep by tradition, conviction and self-will.
Virginia was, so-to-speak, heiress-presumptive. Not that she was likely
to be supplanted by the birth of some one having greater claim to her
aunt's fortune. Her possible rivals for the very substantial income which
her aunt enjoyed were foundling asylums, a new religious cult just then
in its infancy in the hub of the universe, and innumerable "movements"
and "reforms."

She had sent Virginia through