lanced in at the nursery door,
which opened from her room, "don't let Hendie get up a French Revolution
here while I'm gone to dinner."

"Land sakes! Miss Faith! I don't know what you mean, nor whether I can
help it. I dare say he'd get up a Revolution of '76, over again, if he
once set out. He does train like 'lection, fact, sometimes."

"Well, don't let him build barricades with all the chairs, so that I
shall have to demolish my way back again. I'm going to lay out my dress
for to-night."

And very little dinner could her young appetite manage on this last day
of the year. All her vital energy was busy in her anticipative brain,
and glancing thence in sparkles from her eyes, and quivering down in
swift currents to her restless little feet. It mattered little that
there was delicious roast beef smoking on the table, and Christmas pies
arrayed upon the sideboard, while upstairs the bright ribbon and tiny,
shining, old-fashioned buckles were waiting to be shaped into rosettes
for the new slippers, and the lace hung, half basted, from the neck of
the simple but delicate silk dress, and those lovely greenhouse flowers
stood in a glass dish on her dressing table, to be sorted for her hair,
and into a graceful breast knot. No--dinner was a very secondary and
contemptible affair, compared with these.

There were few forms or faces, truly, that were pleasanter to look upon
in the group that stood, disrobed of their careful outer wrappings, in
Mrs. Rushleigh's dressing room; their hurried chat and gladsome
greetings distracted with the drawing on of gloves and the last
adjustment of shining locks, while the bewildering music was floating up
from below, mingled with the hum of voices from the rooms where, as
children say, "the party had begun" already.

And Mrs. Rushleigh, when Faith paid her timid respects in the
drawing-room at last, made her welcome with a peculiar grace and
_empressement_ that had their own flattering weight and charm; for the
lady was a sort of St. Peter of fashion, holding its mystic keys, and
admitting or rejecting whom she would; and culled, with marvelous tact
and taste, the flower of the up-growing world of Mishaumok to adorn "her
set."

After which, Faith, claimed at once by an eager aspirant, and beset with
many a following introduction and petition, was drawn to and kept in the
joyous whirlpool of the dance, till she had breathed in enough of
delight and excitement to carry her quite beyond