up the tea-things.

And then in March Mrs. Threadgale caught cold and died quite suddenly;
and Jenny put some white violets on her grave and wore a black dress and
went home to Islington.

The effect of this wonderful visit was not much more permanent than the
surprise of a new picture-book. Galton had meant not so much a
succession of revelations as a volley of sensations. She was sad at
leaving the country; she missed the affection of her uncle and aunt. She
missed the easy sway she had wielded over everybody at Galton. But she
had very little experience to carry back to Hagworth Street. One would
like to say she carried the memory of that childish wondertime right
through her restless life, but, actually, she never remembered much
about it. It very soon became merely a vague interval between two long
similarities of existence, like a break in a row of houses that does not
admit one to anything more than an added space of sky. She never
communed with elves, or, like young Blake, saw God's forehead pressed
against the window-pane. Jenny was no mystic of nature, and the roar of
humanity would always move her more than the singing of waves and forest
leaves.

Her great hold upon life was the desire of dancing. This she had
fostered on many a level stretch of sward, with daisy chains hung all
about her. She had danced with damson-stained mouth like a young
Bacchante. She had danced while her companions made arches and hoops of
slender willow-stems. She had danced the moon up and the sun down; and
once, when the summer dusk was like wine cooled by woodland airs, when a
nightingale throbbed in every roadside tree and glow-worms spangled the
grass, she had taken a spray of eglantine and led an inspired band of
childish revelers down into the twinkling lamplight of Galton.

Yet this wonderful year became a date in her chronicle chiefly because
age or sunlight or wind tarnished her silver curls to that uncertain
tint which is, unjustly to mice, always called mouse-colored; so that
her arrival at Number Seventeen was greeted by a chorus of disapproval.

"Good gracious!" cried Mrs. Raeburn, when she saw her. "Will you only
look at her hair?"

"What's gone with it?" asked Jenny.

"Why, what a terrible color. No color at all, you might say. I feel
quite disgusted."

"Perhaps she won't be quite such a Miss Vain now," Ruby put in.

Jenny was discouraged. The London spring was trying after Galton, and
one day, a month or t